Art is at the heart of Paris. From the portrait artists vying for your coin around Montmartre; to the European masters on display in the galleries of the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay and Versailles; to the modern street art gems found scattered around the city, there’s art everywhere you care to look.
The Musee du Louvre is probably the most iconic, at least for tourists.
Of course, it houses the unassuming little portrait known to most as the Mona Lisa and the armless statue of Venus de Milo amongst other notable art.
But as the late, wise All-Blacks rugby player Jonah Lomu once said to me when he queued behind me to enter in 1995, you’ve got to look beyond the famous paintings. As impressionable backpackers, he challenged my friend and I all those years ago to not be guided by the hordes, and instead find art that spoke to us outside of the famous few. Now, almost 30 years later, my family and I embraced this sage advice again, making sure we visited less frequented galleries, finding some fascinating and amusing art in the process.
We challenged the kids to name their favourite pieces and the ‘nipple twisting’ portrait of two sisters (Gabrielle d’Estrées and one of her sisters) in the bath was the standout winner. (And the backstory is not what you think! https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-meaning-one-oddly-erotic-paintings-western-art )
Masterpieces also adorn the corridors and walls of Palace of Versailles, as well as its architecture and gardens being works of art in themselves!
It was a shame it was so chilly (read freezing), or we might have taken a longer stroll around the grounds.
On a whim, we decided to visit the Musee d’Orsay, an art gallery devoted to French Impressionists and post-Impressionists. Apparently, this is the gallery the locals like to visit. At present, it features a Van Gogh exhibition, showcasing his works from the last two months of his life.
Not only was this included in the very reasonable price of entry (€28 total for all 5 of us), but the standard collection features one masterpiece after another. I was hard-pressed to find a room that didn’t have something I recognised! Once, while taking a photograph of the building itself (once a grand train station), I turned around to come face to face with Rodin’s The Thinker.
To get to the Van Gogh queue, you casually walked past Whistler’s Mother.
Degas, Cezanne, Monet: everywhere you spun, there was another masterpiece.
I tried to impress upon the kids just how incredible this was. Brisbane rarely gets European masters and there’s no way you’d ever find such huge collection in one place in Australia. C’est magnifique!
Knights' Adventures 
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