The Nymphéas rooms
Eight murals encircling you through two successive ovals under natural light — sit at the centre and let your eyes swim; nothing like it exists anywhere.
Traktorminze — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Jebulon — CC0 · Huỳnh Phạm So Ny's Album — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Huỳnh Phạm So Ny's Album — CC BY-SA 2.0
Different missions: the Orangerie is the unique immersive lily experience; Marmottan holds the largest collection across all his periods. True devotees do both — nearly two ends of one metro line.
They don't compete: the Orangerie is a focused hour of contemplation, Orsay an encyclopedic half-day. The perfect single day: Orsay in the morning, cross the river and Tuileries, then the lilies as a quiet finale.
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In the western corner of the Tuileries, inside a former royal orange-house, waits one of the purest art experiences in the world: the two oval "Nymphéas" rooms Claude Monet designed himself for eight monumental murals of his Giverny water lilies — a hundred metres of water and light wrapping around you beneath natural skylight, the painter's final testament, given to France after the First World War as "a haven of peaceful meditation." The lower floor is a surprise equal to the upper: the Paul Guillaume collection — Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, Henri Rousseau — among the finest private collections ever passed into public hands. The museum is deliberately small: an hour covers it in theory, but the lily rooms swallow time — many enter "for ten minutes" and emerge after fifty. Book the first morning slot to have the ovals nearly empty; no museum experience is more damaged by crowds than this one.
Eight murals encircling you through two successive ovals under natural light — sit at the centre and let your eyes swim; nothing like it exists anywhere.
Modigliani, Soutine and Henri Rousseau downstairs — the astonishing story of a self-made dealer who collected the twentieth century before it was famous.
The painter pledged the murals to France on Armistice Day 1918 and oversaw their rooms until his death — knowing the story doubles the room's power.
Tuileries Garden, Place de la Concorde end, 75001 Paris