Musée de l'Orangerie

The Musée de l'Orangerie sits at the western corner of the Tuileries Garden in Paris's 1st arrondissement, beside Place de la Concorde and facing the Seine. The building was constructed in the 1850s as a greenhouse for the garden's orange trees and later converted into a gallery. It is best known for Claude Monet's Water Lilies (Nymphéas), eight monumental panels that the artist gave to the state and installed in two oval rooms on the ground floor, designed to Monet's own specifications and lit by natural daylight from above. The panels, between 1.97 metres tall and over 90 metres in total length, wrap around the walls so that visitors are enveloped by the pond scenes at different times of day. The lower level holds the Walter-Guillaume collection, with works by Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Soutine and the Douanier Rousseau, as well as temporary exhibitions. A visit typically takes one to two hours. The Water Lilies rooms are most atmospheric when uncrowded, and groups gather mostly between late morning and mid-afternoon, so visitors seeking a contemplative visit tend to go in the first hour after opening or in the final hour before closing, and on overcast days when the natural light is soft. Photography without flash is generally allowed in the permanent collection. The museum sits close to the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay across the river, and a combination visit with the Tuileries garden and the Place de la Concorde is easy on foot. Seating in the oval rooms allows visitors to sit and take in the panels at leisure. Monet worked on the series in his garden at Giverny during the last decades of his life and offered the panels to the French state in the days after the 1918 Armistice, installing them here in 1927 shortly after his death. The museum underwent a renovation in the 2000s that restored the natural overhead light that Monet had intended, and its small size makes it one of the more manageable major museums in the capital for a short visit.