The tours, led by national museum guides, concentrate on an examination about ten works relevant to the chosen theme.
Information sheets are available, and can be downloaded from the website to help with preparation of certain works.
The works presented here are suggestions. The guide leading the group is free to choose those which best illustrate the theme of the tour.
Tours indicated here are those with English-speaking guides. For other tours please consult the French version of the website.
Discovering the Musée d'Orsay, its architecture, its choices in presenting the collections and some of its major works, leads to questions about the role of a museum and the presentation of the history of art.
The 19th century is characterised by creative turmoil, vigorous artistic confrontations, and the emergence of the avant-garde movements: Realists, Impressionists, Symbolists, Post-Impressionists, etc.
Traditional Academy painting was challenged by the Realist painters and by young artists who, with Manet, pushed aside the traditional criteria of good taste, and laid the foundations of modern painting.
The numerous commissions for decoration in urban spaces sparked off a veritable mania for statuary. However, many sculptors broke away from the constraints of the commission, and brought in new subjects, materials and techniques.
Those painters who liked to portray the reality of daily life, mainly people at work, contrasted with those who preferred idealism. Realism reached its height with the Barbizon landscape painters Millet and Courbet, before evolving into Naturalism.
With photography as a rival, portrait painting began to adapt to the tastes and expectations of its middle class clientele. The Modernists moved away from making attractive resemblances to portraying the model more freely, often in en everyday setting.
The human body has always been a favourite subject in sculpture. In the 19th century the classical canons gave way to a more natural representation of the body, often in movement: dance, work, sport, etc.
Colour, long considered as an accessory to drawing, had its day in the 19th century. Thanks to open-air painting, the Impressionists used colour to suggest both light and atmosphere, space and depth, before their successors extolled its expressive power.
