This art museum was built as a railway station. The station and hotel, built in just two years, were inaugurated for the World Fair on July 14th, 1900. After becoming surplus to requirements as a railway station it was renovated and, in 1986, reopened as an art museum devoted to (mainly French) art from 1848 to 1914.
Being a French effort, the result is elegant but not very practical: the main hall is still a large open space, now sparsely populated with a few sculptures. Side galleries display some of the larger and earlier paintings. The galleries holding the impressionists and post-impressionists, the most popular rooms at the museum, are several flights of stairs up from the ground floor. But it's worth the climb and dealing with the crowds -- the museum receives over two million visitors a year -- to see room after room of works by Monet, Manet, Pissaro, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Gaugin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Whistler, Seurat, Signac and many others. |
