The Cluny Museum, also known as the National Museum of the Middle Ages, was founded in 1843. It is located in the Latin Quarter in a much older building, the former Cluny Abbey, built in the late fifteenth century on the site of the Gallo-Roman baths from the first to Read More …
The most famous and most intriguing exhibit in the Cluny Museum is “La Dame à la licorne” (The Lady and the Unicorn). This exhibit consists of six large tapestries on display in a room with subdued light. Five of these tapestries show the five senses; Taste, Sight, Touch, Smell and 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 …
At the back end of the ground floor of the Musée d’Orsay, I was surprised to find an exhibit on the construction of the then-new 19th century opera house which was commissioned by the Emperor Napoleon III and designed by the young architect Charles Garnier (1825-1898). The model in my Read More …
Room number 1 in the Musée d’Orsay, the first room on the right on the ground floor, is called Ingres et l’Ingrisme. As soon as you enter you are confronted with one of his most famous paintings, La Source (The Spring). I learned from the museum’s website that Ingres started 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 …