France has a long and glorious cultural history that encompasses painting, sculpture, music and the written word.
The French are proud of their artistic heritage and long have maintained museums to display works of art, especially in Paris, the city that has captured the imagination of travelers for centuries.
Museums such as the Louvre, the Pompidou and the Orsay are important repositories of art, but they are not the only ones to visit.
An array of smaller museums is tucked away throughout the city. Their subjects include locks and keys, waxworks, holograms, postal history, hunting, coins and minting, Jewish art, eyeglasses and military decorations.
There is a museum of advertising posters first made famous by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Minerals, insects and fossils are found in the Botanical Gardens. Porcelain is featured within the historic factory in suburban Sevres. And aviation history is at Le Bourget, where Charles Lindbergh landed.
Many museums present special exhibitions, such as the one devoted to Toulouse-Lautrec, which will run through June 1 at the Grand Palais.
The Louvre is one of the city`s premier attractions for jaded Parisians and first-time visitors alike. Its main entrance is a steel-ribbed, glass pyramid designed by I.M. Pei.
The pyramid was championed by French President Francois Mitterrand but is controversial. It reflects a high-tech influence, while being surrounded by a monumental European structure at one end of the centuries-old Champs Elysees. The oldest of the Louvre`s present buildings are from the 1500s; the museum has been there since the royal collections were opened to the public in 1793.
Anyone who has studied art history will recognize instantly several of the Louvre`s art works, but the museum is so large that it is best to plan what you want to see.
Then pick up a current map on arrival, as the galleries are periodically rearranged and enhanced under the government`s ongoing Grand Louvre project.
The museum has many ancient and non-European works. The Mesopotamian pieces include the law code of Hammurabi from the 18th Century B.C. Works from ancient Egypt range from Old Kingdom sphinxes to Middle Kingdom tombs and New Kingdom jewelry. Pieces from ancient Greece and Rome include the ”Venus de Milo” and the soaring ”Winged Victory of Samothrace.”
The European collections emphasize French art, but there are abundant works from Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, Britain and Spain.
Some of Rembrandt`s self-portraits are here, as are rich paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. Leonardo da Vinci`s ”Mona Lisa” is the Louvre`s most popular, and probably most famous, work.
The inside-out, high-tech Pompidou Center, commonly known as Beaubourg, draws 25,000 visitors a day on average.
Colored pipes and ventilation ducts decorate the exterior of the building, which opened in 1977, while escalators operate in the middle of the maze.
The fourth floor of the Pompidou Center is devoted to art produced since World War I.
A tour begins with the colorful brush strokes of Fauvists such as Henri Matisse and continues with Cubist works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
Included are pieces by abstract artists Wassili Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian, who abandoned figurative elements in favor of color and line. Also represented are Salvador Dali and other Surrealists.
Works by artists such as Andy Warhol and Jackson Pollock are featured as well; contemporary works are one flight down.
Strolling along the Seine toward the Eiffel Tower takes you toward the Orsay. This magnificent museum of 19th Century art is a bright, open space under the arched glass-and-steel roof of a 150-year-old railway station.
The museum opened in 1986 to display the art of la Belle Epoque, the period from the revolution of 1848 to the outbreak of World War I, as the Louvre lacked the space to display so many French masterpieces.
Previous visitors to Paris also will recognize many paintings from the Jeu de Paume, which now holds only temporary exhibits.
Works produced through 1880 are on the ground floor of the Orsay.
Camille Corot`s paintings illustrate the colors of the woods in shimmering greens and silver. Pieces by Gustave Courbet, such as ”The Burial at Ornans,” reflect the beauty of the rocky countryside of the artist`s native Franche Comte, near the Swiss border.
Edouard Manet`s once-scandalous ”Luncheon on the Grass,” picturing a naked woman and two clothed men enjoying a picnic, also is here.
The far end of this floor houses architectural displays and leads you up to the middle level and its sinuous Art Nouveau works, from French and Belgian furniture to Hector Guimard`s Metro stations.
Some of Guimard`s designs, such as the Abbesses stop on Montmartre, are still in use.
Impressionist and post-Impressionist works are on the top floor.
Subjects painted by Claude Monet include water lilies, poppy fields, the St. Lazare station and Rouen Cathedral. Edgar Degas` depictions of ballet dancers and racehorses are nearby.
Pierre Auguste Renoir`s works include his Montmartre dance scenes. Paul Cezanne`s portraits, still lifes and landscapes show a sense of geometric understanding that foreshadowed Cubism.
The Orsay is in the Faubourg St. Germain, a neighborhood of elegant 18th Century hotels particuliers, or town houses.
Enter one, the Hotel Biron, through a gate in the high wall to view part of the gardens and a classical facade. Its Rodin Museum is where the sculptor Auguste Rodin lived from 1908 until his death in 1917.
Rodin`s larger works in bronze, ”The Thinker,” ”The Burghers of Calais” and ”The Gates of Hell,” are in the garden. Inside are statues of Balzac and Victor Hugo, sculpted hands, busts of men and women and large marble pieces such as ”The Kiss.”
Cross the Seine in front of the Eiffel Tower to the 16th arrondissement. The grounds of the Palais de Chaillot provide eye-catching vistas back across the river.
One of the city`s two museums of Asian art is nearby. The Guimet has Cambodian temple carvings, Indian sculptures and Chinese ceramics and screens. The Cernuschi, near Parc Monceau, specializes in ancient Chinese pottery, bronzes and ceramics.
The Ile de France, the historical heart of the French nation around Paris, has chateaux from the Renaissance to the early 1800s.
The furniture, tapestries, ceramics and enamels of the Renaissance Museum are at the 16th Century Chateau d`Ecouen.
The apartments of Napoleon`s Empress Josephine at Malmaison have the largest collection of items that once belonged to the emperor and empress.
Chantilly has fine art and a ”living” equestrian museum in the majestic Grand Stables, built in the 1700s to house hundreds of horses and hounds.
St. Germain en Laye houses the archeological finds of the Museum of National Antiquities, including the oldest known representation of a human face, the tiny bust of ”The Lady of Brassempouy,” circa 20,000 B.C.
The Orangerie Museum is across the formal Tuileries Gardens, where children often play with toy boats in its two ponds.
Its Walter-Guillaume collection has works from the Impressionist period through 1930 and a large selection of realist paintings by Andre Derain.
France`s most important collection of works by Henri Rousseau includes group portraits and suburban landscapes. Still lifes and figures by Renoir and female figures by Matisse are also well-represented.
The downstairs of the Orangerie is a good place to pay homage to Monet. Two oval rooms display large panels of nympheas, water lilies, painted in the gardens of his home in Giverny.
To continue a Monet journey, search out the Marmottan Museum near the Bois de Boulogne. Once there, go directly to the basement gallery, an awe-inspiring room filled with more of the artist`s paintings, including some of water lilies, many of which were donated by his son.
These museums let you see many of Monet`s ”series paintings” that use a limited number of subjects to study color and light in different seasons and at different times of day.
Documents from the National Archives in the Museum of French History are a way to experience important historical developments, including the royal and revolutionary 1700s.
The palace is known for the ornate Rococo interior decoration installed by the Prince and Princess of Soubise in the early 18th Century.
Arms, armor, uniforms, fortifications, banners and military pictures are in the Army Museum in the Hotel des Invalides. This 1674 building is best known for the Dome Church, in which Napoleon`s tomb rests.
Model ships, shipbuilding and navigation are the subjects of the Navy Museum, one of four museums in the Palais de Chaillot.
The Marquise de Sevigne`s letters to her daughter are a literary chronicle of aristocratic life in the late 1600s. Visitors enter the Museum of the History of Paris through the Hotel Carnavalet, her home in the Marais, on the Right Bank. The Marais, named for the swamp it once was, is an area of elegant town houses in which the nation`s elite lived a few hundred years ago. The National Technical Museum was founded by the Revolutionary government in 1794. It displays thousands of instruments and machines that show the evolution of science and technology, one being Foucault`s pendulum.
Contrast is provided by the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions in the Bois de Boulogne. It allows visitors to experience what life was like in rural and preindustrial France. The exhibits cover traditional means of utilizing nature and items related to domestic life, agriculture and crafts.
To turn to the early years of the city`s history, cross the ancient heart of the city, the Ile de la Cite, to the Cluny Museum in the Latin Quarter.
The Cluny is best known for ”The Lady and the Unicorn” and other exquisite 15th Century tapestries with red backgrounds, rich coloring and handsome figures. The level of detail achieved by the weavers, including the small plants and animals pictured within the tapestries, is most impressive.
But despite such a rich historical heritage, Paris is a thoroughly modern city and a paradise for lovers of 20th Century art.
In addition to the fine collection found at the Pompidou, the city`s Modern Art Museum offers paintings produced since 1905. They include Picasso`s Cubist works, brightly colored Fauvist paintings by Matisse and Derain, major pieces by Robert Delaunay and works by foreign artists.
The National Picasso Museum opened in 1985 as the permanent home of pieces given to the French government in lieu of inheritance taxes after the artist`s death in 1973.
It is the largest single collection of works by Picasso. More than 200 paintings, as well as sculptures, ceramics, drawings and prints, are displayed by period and style to show the evolution of the artist`s work.
The museum is in the ”salt” mansion, where the collector of the infamous pre-Revolutionary salt tax once lived.
When visiting, you may want to explore the rest of this wonderful city.
For every noble landmark there is an intimate neighborhood of narrow streets, small shops and residences that is as much an expression of the city`s vitality and charm as any of its museums.
The Place des Vosges, a square lined with arcaded, symmetrical, stone-and-pink-brick edifices completed in 1612, is considered one of Paris` most picturesque havens.
