There are said to be 38,000 works of art on display in the Louvre in Paris, so it’s sort of like the internet or the Frankfurt Book Fair — you can’t possibly see them all, so you have to navigate to see what you want, or take potluck. And don’t Read More …
The Carrousel du Louvre is an underground shopping center directly adjoining the Louvre Museum in Paris. It was built from 1991 to 1993 as part of the second phase of the Grand Louvre project, and includes an entrance to the museum itself, which is open “at peak times” (according to Read More …
The Louvre in Paris began as a fortress, built starting in 1190 at the behest of King Philippe Auguste (1165-1223). The fortress was at one end of Philippe Auguste’s wall, a system of city fortifications that he ordered built because he didn’t want the city to be left undefended while Read More …
In the middle of May 2021, museums in France began to re-open following the third coronavirus lockdown. Soon, articles started appearing in the French press suggesting that this would be a good time for residents of Paris and the surrounding Île-de-France to visit popular museums such as the Louvre, since Read More …
Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) was the French scholar who founded the study of Egyptology by being the first to decipher ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. He published his translation and analysis of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs in 1822 and 1824. Shortly thereafter he took on the task of establishing a new department of Read More …
After twelve densely packed rooms of the thematic tour of ancient Egypt, a long staircase (or an elevator for people with restricted mobility) leads down to room 13, where a huge royal tomb is on display. It is the red granite tomb of pharaoh Ramses III, who ruled Egypt from Read More …
Paintings by French neo-classical artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) are on display both in the Louvre and in the Musée d’Orsay, across the river. My first photo (above) shows a painting by Ingres from the year 1862 called Le bain turc (The Turkish Bath). It is in the Louvre in room Read More …
In pre-Covid times, it was not uncommon to see hundreds of people queuing to get into the Louvre, the world’s largest museum. I took these photos on a rainy Sunday afternoon in 2013 from inside the museum, where I was spending the day with the Belgian art connoisseur Eddy Dijssel Read More …
Later in the afternoon, Eddy suggested that we look for the paintings of Claude Lorrain, which he hadn’t seen for a long time. I thought this was a good idea, since I had missed the big exhibition called “Claude Lorrain — The Enchanted Landscape” at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt Read More …
The Louvre, being such a huge museum, is divided up into three “wings”: The big hollow square at the back, meaning the East, is called the Sully Wing, named after Maximilien de Béthune, the first Duke of Sully (1560–1641), who was the finance minister and chief advisor to King Henry Read More …