During a month-long stay in Paris I worked on my art appreciation by adding to my list of ‘famous paintings I have seen.’ I hit the mother lode at Musée d’Orsay.
I don’t know much about art – almost nothing actually. It was only quite recently that I realised Manet and Monet were two completely different people and the former’s name was not a typo.
I’ve never studied art or art history. I’ve no interest in analysing an artist’s brushstrokes to find evidence of a troubled relationship with his mother or angst about a girl who didn’t like him. I struggle a lot at times to understand how the word ‘masterpiece’ comes to apply to one person’s vase of flowers and not another’s. All I know about is whether or not I find a painting pleasing to look at. It’s as simple as that.
In fact looking at paintings is still quite new to me. I didn’t pay money to look at art until I was 26 years old.
I found myself bored in Amsterdam on a freezing cold day with nothing to do and hours to kill. It was sex shops or the Van Gough Museum. I chose Vincent. To my surprise I actually loved it. I found a new interest and Vincent has been a firm favourite ever since.
Since this minor epiphany with Vincent all those years ago I’ve gradually been ticking off sightings of the great works of art. It’s been a rather short list to date that does include Sunflowers, Mona Lisa and the Scream.
I really hit the mother lode the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. For starters the building itself – an 18th century railway station – is glorious. If it were empty, it would still be a fabulous place to spend a few hours. But it’s not empty. It’s filled with the world’s largest collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces in the world, in addition to photography and sculpture. Temporary exhibitions ensure there’s always something new.
The array of impressionist paintings had me ticking things off my list lickety split. There was Van Gough’s self-portrait. Tick. Then came Monet’s Water lilies and Haystacks. Tick, tick.
Ticking off the masterpieces is not as easy as it might seem. Monet painted a whole series of the water lilies paintings and there are multiple versions of Haystacks around. I do now have confirmed sightings of at least one version of each.
I ticked off La Bal du Moulin de la Galette by Renoir, Dancers and Dancers in blue by Degas, Lunch On the Grass and Olympia by Manet (I am now quite clear on the difference between him and Monet) and several of Gauguin’s works that I had seen copies of in Tahiti.
If you like the Impressionists Musée d’Orsay is definitely the place for you. You can become a little blasé about it all. I saw one American gentleman wave his hand broadly in the direction of a row of four paintings while asking his mate ‘so are these well known?’ His mate obviously thought not because they headed in the opposite direction without taking a closer look. I crept a little closer just to check what it was they hadn’t thought worth stopping for. They were Monets.
I was just as bad. So taken was I by the array of beautiful impressionist paintings that I cast barely a sideways glance at an enormous and rather unattractive painting of an unattractive old woman. I only stopped because I heard another American tourist say to his mate ‘Oh wow I think that’s the original.’ Wow, original what? I decided I better take a closer look. The old woman was Whistler’s Mother. Tick.