Friday, September 20, 2013

The Orangerie

My favorite small art museum in Paris is the Orangerie (although the Picasso Museum is a contender if they ever re-open after a years long renovation).  Today my sister and her husband visited it with me and I was glad that they agreed with me.  Of course the main attraction is the large Monet water lily paintings, which you are no longer permitted to photograph.  If they were the only pictures in the museum it would still be worth the price of admission.  However, there's also a very nice group of modern paintings collected by Paul Guillaume and his wife and given to France in 1959.  I particularly liked the Renoir and Matisse works.

On our way to the Orangerie we noticed a collection of about 10 shrines to French citizens who lost their lives in World War II.  It's very common and moving to see these and there are always flowers at them.  Some of them are located at the actual spot where the person died.








The Tuileries (where the Orangerie is located) is a classical French garden, but near the west entrance is a large Dubuffet sculpture.














We tried another new restaurant today, Chez Marianne, a popular Middle Eastern Jewish restaurant located in the Marais district.  It offers composed plates where you select 4, 6, or 8 items from a list of about 20 items, depending on how hungry you are and what you are willing to pay - sort of like the "compose your own bento box" place that we ate at about a week ago.  It was a bit challenging because the menu is in French only and offered lots of food with which we were unfamiliar.  However, we managed to successfully order a meal that we enjoyed.  I had pastrami, hummus, artichoke salad, and Greek style mushrooms.


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