Musée de l'Orangerie

The building went up in 1852 to shelter the Tuileries' orange trees in winter. After the 1918 armistice, Monet offered the state his great Water Lilies as a monument to peace, and the museum opened in 1927, a few months after his death.

The eight canvases, about two metres high and nearly a hundred metres long in all, cover the walls of two oval rooms lit from above by daylight, as the painter wished. Downstairs is the Walter-Guillaume collection, with Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani and Soutine.