Art Museums in France
I went to soooo many museums and historic sites in the time I was there, it was amazing! I tried to keep my picture taking to a minimum and I also took quite a few bad photos, so for these reasons there aren't a whole lot of photos per museum. The museums are in the order I went to them in and the title of the museums are links to their websites. Hope you enjoy this mini virtual tour!
This was one of the most crowded places I've ever been, definitely the most crowded exhibit I've ever been to. It was next to impossible to get good photos so most of what I took at this exhibit was just so I could look it up later. This exhibit gave me a new favorite illustrator.
This was one of my favorite museums we visited. It's a small property that used to be a home and studio for a number of artists and has since been converted to a museum.
I wound up going to the Louvre twice, once with the school and once on my own because I had some free time and was in the area. It's huge so I was thankful to get to see more before we left. The first time we went, we had tickets for a Leonardo da Vinci exhibit celebrating the 500th anniversary of his death. It was amazing to see so many of his sketchbooks and notes as well as final pieces. Even though I visited twice I'm going to include all the photos here.
Jardins des Plantes is a large botanical garden that also has a zoo and several museums on the same property. I could have spent days in the Gallery of Evolution, which held a lot of life size animal models, both taxidermied and completely fake. They also had a lot of plants and insects. I kept stopping to sketch things and ended up only getting through 3 1/2 of the floors. The Mineralogy & Geology Gallery was pretty small so I went through it pretty quickly.
MAD is actually just over in the western wing of the Louvre, but it's a separate museum. Decorative arts include fashion, interior design, products, etc. Parts of this museum were under renovation/construction so I didn't get to see all of the regular collections.
This museum had a whole lot of really cool exhibits, but we didn't have much time here and so I saw probably just around half of them and we were speeding through it.
10. Saint-Paul de Mausole (The asylum Van Gogh stayed in), Saint Rémy
I can't find a website for the museum itself, only articles about it. In 1889, Vincent van Gogh self-committed to this mental institution. A portion of the building has been turned into a museum and his room was reconstructed. There is another building on the property that is a working mental institution.
The Popes Palace had iPads that you took through the tour with you and you could hold it up and see through the camera how different rooms would have looked when they were decorated and in use. There were also several mini games to find around the palace, it was quite cool, but again we had a very limited amount of time to spend here so I didn't take full advantage of it.
The outside of this building is wild! It's like a concrete curtain made to look like fishing net surrounding the building.
