The Orangerie is two museums stacked on top of each other, and almost nobody is told this before they arrive.
Upstairs are the two oval rooms Monet designed himself, with eight Water Lilies panels curved around the walls. Downstairs is the Walter-Guillaume collection — 148 works, including 25 Renoirs, 22 Soutines, 15 Cézannes and 12 Picassos.
Most visitors see the Water Lilies and leave. They came for Monet, the rooms deliver, and the stairs down are easy to read as the way out. This guide covers both floors with the room each work hangs in.
Quick List: 10 Must-See Works at the Orangerie
- Water Lilies — first oval room — Monet — Ground floor, Room 2
- Water Lilies — second oval room — Monet — Ground floor, Room 3
- Paul Guillaume, Novo Pilota — Modigliani — Lower level, Room 8
- Portrait of Mademoiselle Chanel — Marie Laurencin — Lower level, Room 10
- Portrait of Madame Paul Guillaume — Marie Laurencin — Lower level, Room 10
- Odalisque in Red Trousers — Matisse — Lower level, Room 11
- Young Girls at the Piano — Renoir — Lower level, Room 12
- Portrait of Madame Cézanne — Cézanne — Lower level, Room 12
- The Wedding — Rousseau — Lower level, Room 15
- Père Junier's Cart — Rousseau — Lower level, Room 15
Featured Highlights (With Audio Preview)
1. Young Girls at the Piano — Renoir
📍 Lower level, Room 12
Renoir painted this subject at least five times, and the versions are scattered — the Musée d'Orsay has one, the Metropolitan has one, the Hermitage has one. This is the Orangerie's. If you have seen the painting before in a book, you have probably seen a different canvas. Standing in front of this one, look at how little of it is drawn: the girls are built almost entirely out of soft colour.
2. The Wedding — Rousseau
📍 Lower level, Room 15
Rousseau was a customs officer who taught himself to paint, and the professionals of his day found him ridiculous. Look at the bride's dress and you can see why they were wrong: it is the brightest thing in the picture and it holds the whole group together. Note also that nobody is standing on anything — the family floats slightly, and the dog is the most solidly placed figure in the painting.
3. Paul Guillaume, Novo Pilota — Modigliani
📍 Lower level, Room 8
Paul Guillaume is the reason this floor exists — he was the dealer who assembled most of what you are standing in, and Modigliani painted him four times. Look at the bottom of the canvas: the words NOVO PILOTA, "new pilot", are written into the paint. It is Modigliani calling his dealer the man steering modern art, and it is the only title the picture has ever needed.
Full List: 10 Works by Floor
Ground floor
Lower level
How to See These in 90 Minutes
Ninety minutes is enough, and the order matters more than the time.
Do the Water Lilies first, while the rooms are quietest and you are not yet tired. Sit down in both. They were built to be sat in — Monet specified the daylight and the curve of the walls, and standing in the middle for two minutes gets you almost none of it.
Then go down. The Walter-Guillaume rooms run in a loop: Modigliani's portrait of Paul Guillaume in Room 8, the two Laurencin portraits in Room 10, Matisse in Room 11, Renoir and Cézanne in Room 12, and the two Rousseaus in Room 15.
If you only have an hour, cut the downstairs loop rather than the sitting. The panels are the thing you cannot get anywhere else.
A Smarter Way to Explore the Orangerie
Instead of navigating blindly, many visitors now use guided routes and audio commentary to make the visit make sense.
With MuseCat, you can:
- Follow a route that covers both floors, not just the famous one
- Hear why a work looks the way it does while standing in front of it
- Keep going without a signal, which matters underground
Final Thought
The Orangerie is the smallest of the great Paris collections and the easiest to underestimate. You can see all of it properly in the time most people spend queueing elsewhere.
Just take the stairs down before you leave.
Start your Orangerie visit the smart way →
Artwork images via Wikimedia Commons. Photographs of the two Rousseaus by xiquinhosilva (CC BY 2.0); Young Girls at the Piano (CC BY-SA 4.0).