Musée d'Orsay

The museum, like every building that stood on the spot before it, takes its name from the quai d'Orsay alongside, itself named for Charles Boucher d'Orsay, the provost of merchants who had the quay built. The Palais d'Orsay went up on the site from 1810, decorated with frescoes by Théodore Chassériau; the Conseil d'État moved into its ground floor in 1840 and the Cour des comptes into the first floor two years later. The palace burnt during the Paris Commune in 1871 and was left in ruins.

The ruins gave way to a railway station, the Gare d'Orsay, terminus of the Compagnie du chemin de fer de Paris à Orléans, built between 1898 and 1900 to bring visitors and foreign delegations to the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The building is given to the architect Victor Laloux, though some accounts credit the design to three men, Lucien Magne, Émile Bénard and Laloux. The Beaux-Arts station, on the Left Bank of the Seine, was judged an anachronism.

Permission to demolish the station was granted in 1970, but Jacques Duhamel, Minister for Cultural Affairs, ruled against plans to put a hotel in its place; the building went onto the supplementary list of Historic Monuments and was finally listed in 1978. Work in the 1970s drove a kilometre-long tunnel beneath it for line C of the Réseau Express Régional, with a new station under the old one. The proposal to make the station a museum came from the Directorate of the Museum of France, the aim being to bridge the gap between the Louvre and the National Museum of Modern Art at the Pompidou Centre. Georges Pompidou accepted the plan and a study was commissioned in 1974; the conversion was carried through on the decision of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and confirmed by François Mitterrand.

ACT Architecture — Pierre Colboc, Renaud Bardon and Jean-Paul Philippon — won the design competition and created 20,000 square metres of new floorspace on four floors, the construction carried out by Bouygues. In 1981 the Italian architect Gae Aulenti was chosen for the interior, arranging galleries on the three main levels beneath the barrel-vaulted atrium; the stone structures of the old train platforms became the walls of a central nave. The building was ready for its exhibits in July 1986, and installing some 2,000 paintings and 600 sculptures took six months. Mitterrand opened the museum on 9 December 1986, with 1,200 sculptures on show, drawn from the Louvre, from state loans and from the Musée du Luxembourg.

On the night of 6 October 2007, during Nuit Blanche, intruders entered the museum and tore Monet's Le Pont d'Argenteuil of 1874 over some ten centimetres; the painting was afterwards restored. A partial rearrangement of the galleries, ordered by the then director Guy Cogeval, opened on 20 October 2011 for the museum's twenty-fifth anniversary after two years of work and a budget of €20 million: the Pavillon Amont added five levels and 2,000 square metres for the decorative arts, the Impressionist gallery was renovated with solid glass benches by the Japanese designer Tokujin Yoshioka, and the Campana brothers redesigned the Café de l'horloge.

The musée de l'Orangerie was attached to the Orsay public establishment in 2010, and in March 2021 the name of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who had died in December 2020, was added to the joint institution's title. The museum, a national museum under the French museums service, holds Western art from 1848 to 1914 and the largest collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist painting in the world, more than 480 Impressionist canvases and over 600 post-Impressionist. It drew 3.2 million visitors in 2022, up from 1.4 million in 2021, second among France's art museums to the Louvre.

A donation from the American collectors Spencer and Marlene Hays — 293 works on one account, about 600 on another — helped launch the Orsay Grand Ouvert project, which is also funded by an anonymous American gift of €20 million towards teaching studios in 2024 and a 1,200-square-metre gallery on the rue de Lille side in 2026. Annick Lemoine became president on 19 March 2026, following the death of Sylvain Amic. In May 2026 the museum opened a permanent display of works looted or sold under duress during the Nazi occupation of France, among them thirteen unclaimed pieces from the Musées Nationaux Récupération collection, including paintings by Degas and Renoir.