Musee D'Orsay: Home of Ancient Art From 1848-1914 - Essay Sample

Introduction

Musee d'Orsay is a French museum located in Paris on the left bank of River Seine. Previously, the museum housed the former Gare d'Orsay, an old railway station constructed at the beginning of the 19th century. The museum is home to ancient French art dating back from 1848 to 1914, ranging from photography, sculptures, furniture, and even paintings. It has the most extensive collection of post-impressionist and impressionist masterworks of the world by the world's famous painters at the time. This paper is an account of a virtual visit in the museum and will focus on mainly three pieces of art; Dancers by Edgar Degas, The Birth of Venus by Alexander Cabanel, and The Bathers of Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Dancers by Edgar Degas

Edgar went back to a theme he had already covered in his previous work, which he did in the 1870s called the ballerinas resting. He also revisited his studies on countre-jour lighting, which was responsible for the reduction in a silhouette. The concept suppressed details about while obscured the characteristic features of a body and its face forcing them to anonymity. The art is the best example of Dancers classical despite its application of the old formulae. It was not only innovative in composition but also in size. It is believed that the painter went for a smaller sized artwork simplifying the structures, decrease the pictorial space, reduced the viewpoint, even making the picture more natural. He also chose to focus on one single character or a group of people. The painter also moved away from his usual caricatural strategy with which he had done his previous works. That was in response to the critics of his work who complained about the confusing mass of colors and the hard to understand lines that destroyed the meaning of the painting. It is thus sufficient to conclude that art is a manifesto.

In this art, Edgar has adopted an almost square shape, a foreign concept known by his fans, but which he later chooses it fully as his style and his next works are made that way. Degas also moved from focusing on single people in his art to concentrate on groups. In this painting, he has a group of people who appear to be dancing while touching each other and have many heads but looks like they are linked to the same body. They have all the other features of the human body and are separated by white tutus. It can be seen from the painting that the appears to be "catching a back or a shoulder and is reflected by the blond of the red of the hair. The pastel itself sometimes dense, sometimes light, wonderfully interprets the diaphanous tutus and grey, dusty atmosphere of this room. He also added vivid bursts of color like the red and the almost yellow of a chignon." The work is an impressive description of Dancers and shows the vitality of Edgar

The Birth of Venus by Alexander Cabanel

The painting counts as one of the greatest works of the 1863 Salon, where Napoleon III bought it. The art was a testimony of the official artistic and famous taste of the period when it was developed. Cabanel uses both references to Ingres and style of art used in the 18th Century in a Second Empire's eclectic feature. The painting portrays a nude who is idealized in a sensual way. The ambiguity was denounced by Emile saying, "The goddess drowned in a river of milk, resembles the courtesan, not made of flesh and bone-that would be indecent- but of a pink and white Marzipan." The painting caused a major scandal.The Bathers of Pierre-Auguste-Renoir

It describes the experimentation that Renoir did at the end of his life. He went back to his specialty and expertise, which was nudes on the open air in the year 1910, and produced various huge paintings. He was reminiscing nature's timeless view where there was no reference to the contemporary world as they were all banned. The art can also be used as Renoir's testament in pictorial form as he died in December of 1919. His sons gave the art to the State in 1923 to honor their dad and his proof. The painter painted what he saw in his property in the South of France. He saw two models lying, and three bathers sporting in the stream in the background, and the garden was full of olive trees. The landscape represented that of the Mediterranean found in Greece and Italy at a time when the earth was referred to as the paradise of the gods. He opined that was what he wanted to represent in the paint. The models' sensuality gives more emphasis to idyllic vision together with their full forms and the richness in color. Renoirs got his inspiration from the nudes painted by Reubens and Titian though they did not represent the suffering that he underwent and the illness that affected him.

References

Dancers by Edgar Degas 1884 - 1885https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/dancers/xwE7rgYgnWm68w

The Birth of Venus by Alexandre Cabanel 1863https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-birth-of-venus/awEIYqoUcAJ6TA

The Bathers by Pierre-Auguste Renoir 1918 - 1919https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/the-bathers/swG2YS5LNQrRSg