Musée de l'Orangerie

At the western end of the Tuileries, beside the Place de la Concorde, the Musée de l'Orangerie holds Claude Monet's Water Lilies in two oval rooms that he helped design. The paintings were not hung here; the rooms were built for them. Monet fixed the sequence of the eight compositions, the curve of the walls, and the diffused daylight falling from above, so that the paintings, the architecture, and the light work as one ensemble. It is the reason a visit here feels different from a visit to a gallery of pictures.

The cycle came to France as a gift. The day after the Armistice of November 1918, Monet offered panels to the state through his old friend Georges Clemenceau, then prime minister. The donation was formalized in 1922, and Clemenceau pushed the project through the years of revision that followed, as Monet, his eyesight failing, kept enlarging and reworking the scheme. The rooms opened in May 1927, a few months after the painter's death. He never saw them finished.

The building is older than the museum. It went up in 1852 as the orangery of the Tuileries palace, a long Second Empire shelter for the garden's orange trees, glazed on the Seine side to catch the winter sun. That southern glass is part of why Monet accepted the site. The conversion for the Water Lilies was drawn up by the architect Camille Lefèvre, working to Monet's specifications.

Below the oval rooms sits a second museum. The dealer Paul Guillaume, a friend of Guillaume Apollinaire and one of the first Paris dealers to champion Modigliani and Soutine, assembled a collection that runs from Renoir and Cézanne to Picasso, Matisse, Rousseau, and the École de Paris. After his death in 1934 his widow, Domenica, reshaped the collection with her second husband, Jean Walter; the French state acquired it in stages in 1959 and 1963, and it has been shown at the Orangerie since the mid-1960s as the Walter-Guillaume collection.

The two halves make the museum's argument. Upstairs, the end point of Impressionism at its most radical; downstairs, the dealers' Paris that carried painting from Renoir's generation to the moderns. The names in the lower rooms — Guillaume, Apollinaire, Modigliani, Soutine — are the same names that run through the cafés and studios of Montparnasse elsewhere in these pages.

A renovation between 2000 and 2006 stripped out a mezzanine added in the 1960s and restored the natural light Monet had specified. Since 2010 the museum has been administered jointly with the Musée d'Orsay across the river.

The Orangerie is a concentrated museum rather than an encyclopedic one, and that is its practical appeal: the Water Lilies and the collection can be seen well in sixty to ninety minutes. Choose the Orsay first for the broad survey of nineteenth-century French painting; choose the Orangerie for Monet's ensemble and an intimate route through early modern Paris.