Art, churches, and a great big park (mostly art)

Today I visited two museum, the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Rodin. The Musée d'Orsay is in a building that started life as a lovely Beaux Arts train station. The building was converted (evidently with a great deal of care) to a museum in the 1980s. The center of the museum is occupied by a large open sculpture gallery with the arched ceiling of the old train station rising above; it is a very impressive space. The museum is known for its Impressionist collection; going from painting to painting was a continual feast. I was, predictably, moved to tears by the sight of some of Monet's and Renoir's better-known paintings that I had seen only in books and now saw on canvas at full size. I was also haunted by the works of Van Gogh that I saw, including some of the last things he painted. I really appreciated that fact that I also saw some Renoir landscapes (not his most typical subject) and some paintings by Monet that I wouldn't have guessed were his (because of either the subject matter or the style). So it was a nice balance of meeting old friends face to face and finding new aspects of some of my favorite painters' work.

At the Musée Rodin, today I visited only the garden, which is full of roses and sculptures. The museum is located in the Hôtel Biron, a private mansion built in the 18th century; Rodin later had his studio here. The outside of the building and the grounds are lovely.

Note the sculpture in the pool. (Yes, that is someone's backside you are seeing.) It is a piece from the Gates of Hell (which are standing near the rose garden) depicting the fate of one Ugolino della Gherardesca, a real-life Italian nobleman who came to a bad end. He and his sons died of starvation, and their demise was described in Dante's Inferno, which inspired several artists. Here is a better view of Rodin's interpretation, taken from the side.

Those of you in Bloomington may be familiar with a statue in the Indiana Memorial Union near the entrance to Whittenberger Hall. That statue also depicts Ugolino and his sons; it's the plaster original of a statue by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux that was sent to Indiana by the citizens of France in 1948 in gratitude for help rendered after World War II. (The plaster original was later cast in bronze; I have read online that the bronze is in the Petit Palais, the Louvre, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Met does seem to actually list it among its holdings.)

I also visited three beautiful churches, St. Clotilde (where Cesar Franck was an organist for many years), St. Germain des Prés (one of the oldest, if not the oldest, in Paris), and St. Sulpice (huge, many beautiful chapels, and some paintings by Delacroix). I also basked in the sunlight in the Luxembourg Gardens while people dozed, strolled, chatted, and read all around me, and walked through some interesting parts of St. Germain des Prés, including the Place Jean-Paul Sartre Simone de Beauvoir and the area around the famous cafes where Hemingway and other writers used to hang out. It is a happening spot on a Saturday afternoon in June. I'm planning to spend more time in that area next week.