Set inside a stunning Belle Époque railway station, the Musée d'Orsay on the Left Bank houses world-famous collections of 19th-century art. On the top floor, Impressionist masterpieces by Monet, Degas and Renoir steal the show.
Across the river from the Louvre, this pièce de resistance of the 1900 Exposition Universelle officially became home to the state's collection of 19th-century art in 1986, opening to huge crowds. It boasts the world's best collection of French avant-garde art of the 1900s, when France led the world artistically. Its strengths lie in the art of post-1848 revolutionary France. It was after this political cataclysm that the artistic stranglehold of the academy was exploded, allowing for a profusion of styles.
A brilliant introduction to the crisis in French culture is Couture's Decadence of the Romans, painted the year before the bloody events that would lead to the Second Empire in 1847.
The stylistically revolutionary work of Courbet and Manet are wonderfully represented. Courbet's monumental canvases, the Funeral at Ornans (1851) and The Painter's Studio (1855) hang opposite one another. Manet is represented by Dejeuner sur l'Herbe and Olympia (both 1863) - two paintings which shocked a generation.
The skylit Impressionist gallery on the upper floor is filled with paintings that have perhaps suffered from overexposure - you can't quite be sure you are seeing the real thing, having seen so many postcards of the images. More Manet leads you to masterpieces by Gauguin, Van Gogh and Cézanne.
It's worth continuing on to subsequent work by more esoteric artists such as symbolists Redon and Moreau. There are also marvellous darkened rooms devoted to pastel drawings - Manet and Degas made beautiful examples.
More compact and manageable than the Louvre, the d'Orsay benefits greatly from the huge iron-clad atrium hanging over it, flooding the paintings with natural light.