The Nymphéas, Monet's Water Lilies, occupy two oval rooms at the Orangerie, in a building at the edge of the Tuileries Gardens. Monet designed the installation himself, working on it through the First World War as a kind of secular memorial. The rooms were conceived as a complete environment, not a gallery. The paintings cover the walls from floor to ceiling, with no frame, no gap, no interruption.
Most visitors spend fifteen minutes in those rooms and then leave. The rest of the museum, which contains one of the most significant collections of early twentieth-century painting in France, is often empty. This tour covers both.
What you will see
The Nymphéas. Eight panels across two oval rooms, and the story of how they came to be here: a gift to the state, negotiated over years, installed to Monet's own specifications and opened only after his death. We look at why he chose this building, what the light does to the surfaces through the day, and what he was attempting in the last decade of his life, when his sight was failing and the paintings were growing looser and larger.
The collection downstairs. The Jean Walter-Paul Guillaume collection fills the lower level, assembled by a dealer who knew the artists personally, which gives it a coherence most museum collections lack. Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, Rousseau, Soutine and Derain are all represented, in rooms that are almost always uncrowded, and the relationships between them are the point as much as any single canvas.
The Nymphéas · the Walter-Guillaume collection · the building and its light
Pépin's advice
Come on a weekday morning. The Nymphéas rooms are busy at the weekend and on rainy afternoons. Early on a weekday, they are often quiet enough to sit in front of the paintings without anyone in the frame.
Do not rush the lower level. The Jean Walter-Paul Guillaume collection is downstairs, and it contains works that would be the centrepiece of any other museum. Most visitors walk straight past them to get back to the exit.
Combine with the Musée d'Orsay. The two museums are fifteen minutes apart on foot, on either side of the Tuileries. A morning at the Orangerie and an afternoon at the Orsay is a complete account of French painting from 1870 to 1940.
Good to know
The museum closes on Tuesdays. It sits at the western end of the Tuileries Gardens, in the corner of the Place de la Concorde, and we meet at the entrance on the garden side, a few minutes from Concorde or Tuileries on line 1. Works other than the Nymphéas are occasionally moved for restoration or loan, so if something described here is away on the day, our guide will reshape the visit around what is on the walls.
