Paris Museums

We have seen some National Monuments and National Museums. The D'Orsay and the Louvre. Both are large and both have some art you have seen in books and in prints. First the Pantheon, built to memorialize the motto of the French Republic, Liberty Equality Fraternity. It houses the remains of great Frenchmen and women and statutes and murals depicting heroes of the revolution and of the national ideals.

As we are staying quite close we often walk past it and at night it is imposing too.

One of the crypts is for the author of Les Miserables, Victor Hugo.

 Heroes of the revolution.

In Musee d'Orsay, the great hall contains statue after statue, many quite stunning, quite beautiful, but oh so hard to photograph, for me anyway.
 

 But I did get a pretty good one of this Monet. And one of my favorites too.

Both of us really like this French realist, Leon Lhermitte, Paying the Harvesters. We had never seen it before. It is a very large painting and such power it projects and ethos in the faces of the two working men the one in the foreground and the one standing in the background. It became one of our favorites.  

In the Louvre there are halls, and halls of statues, and rooms and rooms, of statues, artifacts, paintings and more. This is also the only room that we saw that was not full of people. It was a rainy day and everyone decided to go to the Louvre with us.

Patt got a real good photo of Venus de Milo, found on the Greek Island of Milos in the early 1800s but dated from 120 BC, unknown sculptor.  Truly beautiful, but in person, more rough looking from the rough handling of being knocked down and covered in debris I guess than I had imagined. Still beautiful, but not "air brushed" and hence I guess even more human like and therefore more enchanting.

Many of the ceilings are painted and decorated as the Louvre is housed in a former palace (actually a series of palaces connected and enlarged over centuries). Here in the Hall of Napoleon - and of course it is symbolic too, we had the recorded guide - - type in a number, listen to a recording about what you are looking at. We could be there years.

Some of the paintings were seriously 20' x 30' - this one was not, but note the man looking closely standing at lower left for scale.

And the famous painting of the French revolution of Liberty Leading the People by Delacroix. There was a lot of the revolutionary art in one of the halls.

Oh and the collections of fine things, here are some of Napoleon's I think, fine gold and stone ware.  There were crowns and lots of jewelry too.

People taking photos of the Mona Lisa, and taking selfies of themselves with the Moan Lisa about 20 feet away to the right. I have a small photo of the Mona Lisa taken with an iPhone from about 20 feet away.  I will spare you.

We would love to come again and often to both museums. And these are just two of the multiple museums that are here.