Musée d'Orsay: What to See, Floor by Floor

The Musée d'Orsay is a Paris railway station that now holds the art of 1848 to 1914. If you are asking what to see, the short answer is Monet, Degas, Van Gogh and Seurat on Level 5, Courbet, Manet and Millet on the ground floor, and Rodin and Art Nouveau on Level 2. If you are asking how long it takes, the Roamer guide suggests about two hours for the highlights, and its six routes run from 45 to 75 minutes each.

The building comes first

Before the paintings, look at the building. A government palace stood here until it burned on the night of 23 to 24 May 1871, in the last days of the Paris Commune. The Paris-Orléans railway company built a terminus on the site in time for the world's fair of 1900, and the architect Victor Laloux hid its metal frame behind a front of cut stone. The story of the fire, the station and the clock has its own article: the Musée d'Orsay as a train station.

Level 5: the Impressionists and Van Gogh

The top floor is where the famous names are. Monet's Poppies hangs in Room 29: he showed it at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, in the photographer Nadar's former studio. In Room 31 are Caillebotte's The Floor Scrapers, which the Salon refused in 1875 as vulgar, and Degas's Absinthe. Room 32 holds Degas's Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, the bronze cast from the wax that shocked critics in 1881.

Van Gogh has his own room, 36, with the Bedroom in Arles, Doctor Gachet, the church at Auvers and the calm blue night scene that is not the New York one: Starry Night over the Rhône. Room 38 has Seurat's The Circus, unfinished when he died, a few days after it opened at the Salon des Indépendants in March 1891.

The ground floor: Millet, Courbet, Manet and the nave

Level 0 is the Salon and its rebels. Millet's The Gleaners is in Room 5. In Room 7, Courbet's The Painter's Studio measures 361 by 598 centimetres; when the 1855 Exposition Universelle refused it, he built his own Pavilion of Realism and showed it there.

Manet's room is 14, home of Olympia. Room 18 holds his Luncheon on the Grass, the picture the Salon jury refused in 1863. The central aisle, the nave, is lined with sculpture, including Carpeaux's La Danse, a group 4.2 metres high that was unveiled on the Paris Opera's front in July 1869 and had ink thrown over it that August.

Level 2: Rodin, the Nabis and Art Nouveau

Rodin's Gates of Hell stands on the Rodin terrace, a plaster door 6.35 metres high. The state ordered it in 1880 for a museum planned on the very ground where this station later rose. The rest of Level 2 holds the Nabis painters, then Art Nouveau furniture and glass, including Gallé's dragonfly cabinet of 1904 in Room 63 and Gaudí's chapel bench in Room 65.

Is it worth it, and how long does it take

The museum is large, and the useful question is not how to finish it but which rooms to walk. The Roamer guide suggests about two hours for the highlights. If you have less, take the hour route and stop wherever a room holds you; if you love one period, take the route for it, such as the Impressionist floor or the sculpture nave. Short, skippable stops are the point: nobody is waiting for you to move on, and you can end a route at any room.

What is not on the walls right now

Works travel on loan and rooms are rehung, so treat any list, including this one, as a plan and not a promise. On 11 October 2026, the Bal du moulin de la Galette, L'Origine du monde, Whistler's Mother, the Blue Water Lilies and Cézanne's Card Players were not on view. Check the museum's plan on the day, and use these famous titles as a reason to look at their neighbours instead.

Six ready-made routes

The Roamer guide groups the museum into six routes. Each one is a plan on its own, and you can leave any of them at any stop.

• Orsay in an Hour (60 minutes, 11 stops): Poppies, Absinthe, the Little Dancer, Monet's Rouen Cathedral portal, Starry Night, The Circus, The Gleaners, The Painter's Studio, Olympia, Luncheon on the Grass and La Danse, top floor down.
• The Impressionist Floor (75 minutes, 14 stops): Monet, Caillebotte and Degas on Level 5.
• The Salon and the Rebels (60 minutes, 9 stops): what the official Salon loved and what it refused, from Cabanel to Courbet, Manet and Caillebotte.
• Van Gogh to Seurat (50 minutes, 10 stops): Starry Night, the Bedroom, Doctor Gachet and Auvers, then Seurat and the painters around him.
• Sculpture: Carpeaux to Rodin (45 minutes, 9 stops): from the nave to the Gates of Hell and the Thinker.
• Art Nouveau: The Small Things (50 minutes, 11 stops): benches, cabinets, a pendant and a water-lily bed on Level 2.

How this fits the Roamer guide

Roamer's Orsay guide works room by room, at your own pace and with no group to keep up with: open any room, hear its story, skip what you do not want. It is an independent guide and is not affiliated with the museum, and admission to the museum is separate. You can find it here: the Musée d'Orsay guide. If you want Paris outdoors afterwards, try the Louvre and Tuileries walk or the Latin Quarter and Saint-Germain walk.

Cover: the clock tower of the Musée d'Orsay, photograph by sudheerinfo99 via Pexels, Pexels License.