Private Orsay tours

Partly. A timed ticket tells you when you may join the queue, not whether you queue — in season that’s still up to half an hour through security. The only genuine fast entry is the ARC (Accès Rapide Conférencier), a priority pass the museum sells exclusively to licensed guides, used at Door 2, this is what is included in the cost of our tours.

Yes : it holds the largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting in the world, and unlike most great museums you can see the whole of it properly in a morning. It covers French art from 1848 to 1914, the sixty-six years in which European painting turned modern.

They’re one collection split across two buildings: the Louvre holds art up to 1848, the Orsay picks up from 1848 to 1914. If you can only do one, choose by the question that interests you — “how did we get here?” is the Louvre; “what happened when it all changed?” is the Orsay.

 You can, but do the Orsay at 9:30 and the Louvre in the afternoon, not the reverse. Check the closing days first: the Orsay closes Mondays, the Louvre closes Tuesdays : so there’s no day of the week when both are shut, and no Monday or Tuesday when both are open.

 There’s no single combined ticket sold by the two museums. The Paris Museum Pass covers both, but you may still need to reserve a time slot at each one : check that when you buy, not at the door.

Otherwise you have to purchase a Museum Pass. Which doesn’t allow you to be guided in the Louvre. Same the Louvre doesn’t allow individual tickets holders to enjoy the services of a guide. These tickets are more expensive and have to be purchased by a professional.

Two hours covers the collection the museum is famous for without exhausting anyone; three to four if you want the sculpture, the decorative arts and a temporary exhibition.

It’s a converted railway station, so unlike the Louvre you can always see where you’ve been.
Nobody gets lost.

In terms of Impressionist and Post-Impressionists :  Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait and Starry Night Over the Rhône, Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette, Manet’s Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, Degas’ Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, Whistler’s Mother, and Monet’s Rouen Cathedral series.

Most are on the fifth floor, which is worth climbing to first when the museum is busy.

 No : that one is at MoMA in New York.

The Orsay has Starry Night Over the Rhône, painted at Arles a year earlier: the same night sky, over water, with a couple walking the embankment. People arrive looking for the wrong painting and leave having found a better one.

 It depends what you want from the two hours. A €16 ticket gets you in. A guide chooses twenty works out of three thousand, puts them in an order that builds, and tells you what to look at within each one : the difference between having been somewhere and having understood it. 

 A railway station. The Gare d’Orsay opened on 14 July 1900 for the Universal Exposition, built by Victor Laloux, and was obsolete by 1939 : trains became longer than its platforms. It served as a film set, a theatre and an auction house before reopening as a museum in December 1986.