The Musee D'Orsay - Alexandra Bonfante-Warren

The Musee d'Orsay, housed in the old Gare d'Orsay railway station and hotel building which was saved from destruction in 1970 by a combination of timely publicity, ideality of location (opposite the Musee du Louvre), and architectural innovation, contains one of the most magnificent and extensive collections of 19th and early 20th century art in the world. The quality and variety of works in the Musee d'Orsay - limited to the years between 1848 and 1914 - is quite unique. This book combines a thoughtful text that traces the roots of the collection through the context of the contemporary soclety and creative activity happening at the time with 300 colour plates of many of the museum's greatest masterpieces: academic works by Ingres, Couture, Bouguereau, and Delacroix; Impressionist and Post-Impressionist favourites by Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, Van Gogh, Seurat, Signac; Realist, Nabis, Symbolist and Fauvist works by Millet, Denis, Gauguin, Redon, and Matisse; sculpture by Degas, Rodin, and Camille Claudel.;Here are also works in other media, not in the national collections but acquired specifically to complete the museum's multi-disciplinary view of the arts during these years - fumiture, objets d'art, architecture, photography. Jewellery and glassware by Art Nouveau artist Lalique, photographic prints by Nadar, Lewis Carroll and Atget, and the architecture of the 19th century, evoked by the restoration of various elements of the former railway station itself, are but a few of the museum's other myriad attractions.