A few weeks ago I was able to take a trip to Paris and fulfill many dreams. One of the coolest things I was able to do, was to go to the
Louvre. When I went to Italy there were several moments when I was geeking out over beautiful art and things I'd studied in art history, the Louvre is even more like that. In one room they have practically a whole semesters worth of French art history. The Louvre has at least five da Vinci's, some quick googling tells me that, that's about a third of his paintings! There was an amazing Vermeer exhibit while we were there, it was so cool to see tons of Vermeer's in one place and the work of his contemporaries.
We took a flying tour of the Louvre, it's massive and I wanted to see as much as possible. The top of my list were the Mona Lisa (beautiful but obscured by selfie-ists) the rest of the da Vinci's ( so cool just to see a row of da Vinci paintings!) the winged victory (so beautiful!) and the Venus de Milo (also quite beautiful but obscured by many people).
We hit the Islamic art section, that was cool, many beautiful things there. One of these days I'll have to get a camera that works better in low light because museums are often dark (to protect the art).
I was interested by all the students/artists that were making sketches and studies in the Louvre. I wish that I had been assigned or encouraged to do that more when I was in school, we didn't have the Louvre of course but the
MOA and the
SMA have some really great exhibits.
One sad note about the Louvre, it is not very accessible for those with limited mobility (I'm not sure any of Europe really is), if you can't or don't want to climb the stairs and do all of the standing and walking, you might just want to
google it.
We also went to the
Musee d'Orsay, which is where the major impressionist collection is, it's pretty cool as well. We got a little burnt out when we were there, it was our third sight seeing event of the day.
The
Orangerie was also very cool, there are two oval rooms that Monet designed for panels of his water lilies. They also have a smaller collection of more impressionists.
I think those are all the museums we went to but we also went to some beautiful cathedrals,
Notre Dame, and to
Sainte-Chapelle. I think Sainte-Chapelle is lesser known but it is absolutely amazing, just walls and walls of stained glass.
Really all of Paris is kind of a work of art and there are statues and monuments everywhere. It was an amazing trip and I can't wait to go again someday!
