Musée de l'Orangerie

Art museum in Paris, France

The Musée de l'Orangerie is an art gallery of impressionist and post impressionist paintings located in the west corner of the Tuileries Garden next to the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The museum is most famous as the permanent home of eight large Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet, and also contains works by Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Henri Rousseau, Alfred Sisley, Chaïm Soutine, Maurice Utrillo, and others.

The gallery is on the bank of the Seine in the old orangery of the Tuileries Palace on the Place de la Concorde near the Concorde metro station and not far from the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay.

Napoleon III had the Orangerie built in 1852, to store the citrus trees of the Tuileries garden from the cold in the winter.

After World War I, changes came to the Orangerie. In 1921, the State gave the building to the Under Secretariat of State for Fine Arts along with another building, the Jeu de Paume. The goal for these two buildings was to provide a space for living artists to display their works.

The Orangerie was joined with the Louvre in 1930. The western half of the Orangerie was dedicated to temporary exhibitions for the Louvre and other national museums in France. Each year, the Orangerie hosted a variety of exhibitions. From 1930 to 1933, the Orangerie hosted an exhibition on impressionism. In 1934, the exhibition Peintres de la realité (Painters of Reality) was dedicated to the 17th century and became famous. In 1936, the exhibition Rubens et son temps (Rubens and his Age) attracted a million visitors to the museum. There was an entire exhibition dedicated to Degas in 1937, titled in his name. In 1942, there was an exhibition dedicated entirely to Arno Breker, who was an official artist of the Third Reich and who studied in France. In 1946, after the end of WWII, many masterpieces from private collections were recovered in Germany by the French Commission for Art Recovery and the Monuments Men and they were displayed in the Orangerie.

The Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume collections were acquired in 1959 and 1963 respectively. Domenica Walter (1898–1977) was the widow of both Paul Guillaume (1891–1934) and Jean Walter (1883–1957). Paul Guillaume was an art dealer and his desire was to create a museum of French modern art that would be open to the public.

The most recent renovation was made by Olivier Brochet between 2000 and 2006. The rooms that were previously constructed on two levels were knocked down and natural light was restored to the Water Lillies.

The Musée de l'Orangerie is the main story point of the 2000 French adventure PC game Monet: The Mystery of the Orangery. The art gallery, specifically the Water Lilies paintings, was featured in Woody Allen's 2011 film Midnight in Paris and Mia Hansen Løve’s 2022 film One Fine Morning.

The official site of the Orangerie presents a full historical timeline.