Orsay: Paintings

The Mus,e d'Orsay is a national museum devoted to the art of the second half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, between the emergence of realism in 1848 and the beginnings, in 1905 of fauvism, and the bold distortion of form and the strong use of color favored by Matisse, among others. While it covers all fields of artistic creativity, the museum owes much of its fame to its Impressionist collections, formed over more than a century, and the masterpieces of Manet, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. After an introduction which outlines the history of the collections and explains the chronological approach, the authors of Orsay - Paintings , who are curators at the museum, analyze the pictorial creative output of this wonderfully rich and diverse period.