Explore the Orangerie Museum through a 2-hour tour with an expert guide. You'll learn anecdotes and secrets that hide behind the paintings of the most presitigious painters of the world.
The building that houses the museum we visit on this tour, the Orangerie, is nothing but the former orange grove of the Tuileries Gardens which became the storage of pictorial representations of Claude Monet's garden in Giverny. This unique set, a true 'Sixtine of Impressionism' testifies to Monet’s later work. It was designed as a real environment and crowns the Water Lilies cycle begun nearly thirty years before. The set is one of the largest monumental achievements of early twentieth-century painting. This unique masterpiece has no equivalent worldwide.
The second part of the tour is dedicated to the collection of Paul Guillaume, the art dealer of Renoir, Cézanne, Modigliani, Picasso and Matisse. He amassed an extraordinary collection of several hundred paintings, from Impressionism to Modern Art, along with pieces of African art. When he died, his widow Domenica remarried to the architect Jean Walter, transformed and reduced the collection while also making new acquisitions. The French State acquired it in the late 1950s and from then on, the collection was destined for display at the Musée de l'Orangerie.
