Orangerie Museum Private Tour

Orangerie Museum Private Tour with a postgraduate licensed tour guide. The Musée de l'Orangerie is also nicknamed “The Sistine Chapel of Impressionism" because of its two famous immersive rooms of Monet's Water Lilies. But the Orangerie also houses the prestigious Walter-Guillaume collection, which is mainly dedicated to the beginning of the 20th century, with amazing works by Renoir, Cézanne, Modigliani, Picasso, Derain, Matisse, Soutine, Douanier Rousseau, Laurencin and Utrillo.

Photo of the western facade of the Orangerie Museum.

Orangerie Museum Private Guided Tour essentials

From €179 for 1 to 2 people + €40 per extra person

+/- 2-hour guided tour in English
Really private tour: your party only (6 people max.)
Postgraduate (MPhil) certified French national guide
Flexible schedule
Not available on Tuesdays
Skip-the-line ticket to buy online (€12.50 per adult)

Skip-the-line tickets clarification: online tickets.

KNOW MORE / BOOK NOW

Your Private Orangerie Museum Tour Guide

Certified French national guide
BA, Magna Cum Laude, Heritage Development & Preservation
from Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers (Grande Ecole established in 1794)
Postgraduate from Paris Dauphine-PSL University

Know more about Yves, your private tour guide in Paris

The Orangerie Museum

The Orangerie was built in 1852 on the orders of Napoleon III to house the citrus trees of the Tuileries Gardens during the Parisian winters. The large south-facing windows were designed to maximize natural light, while the north side of this prestigious and very special greenhouse was windowless to protect the citrus trees from the cold winds. The building was designed to blend in with its prestigious surroundings, including Place de la Concorde, a reference for the 18th-century neoclassical style. The entrances of the building were designed by Louis Visconti, the famous architect who also designed Napoleon's Tomb in the Invalides.

When not used to protect the trees, the Orangerie was used as a venue for public events.

In 1927, the Orangerie became the Musée Claude Monet - with its two immersive rooms of Monet's Water Lilies - a few months after the artist's death.

From the 1930s, the rest of the Orangerie was used for temporary art exhibitions, many of which became very famous: from 1930 to 1933, Impressionism; 1934, Painters of Reality (17th C.); 1936, Rubens; 1937, Degas, etc.

Since 1966, the Orangerie has also housed the prestigious Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume paintings collections.

Jardin des Tuileries from the Musée de l'Orangerie. Initially, the northern facade of the building was windowless.

Orangerie Museum Tour Organization

The tour is organized in three parts.

The outside of the museum.
The eight large Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet in their two dedicated rooms.
The Walter-Guillaume collection.

Rodin The Kiss Jardin des Tuileries Place de la Concorde in the background.

The Kiss by Rodin in front of the Orangerie Museum entrance: the artistic experience starts outside the museum.

Monet & the Water Lilies

Monet was raised in Le Havre, Normandy; there, he started to study art in 1851, and in 1858 painter Eugène Boudin introduced the young Monet to plein-air (outdoor) painting. Monet arrived in Paris in 1859 and studied at the Académie Suisse. In 1862, he joined the studio of the academic history painter Charles Gleyre. There, he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Frédéric Bazille, and Alfred Sisley, three other painters who also became prominent figures in the pre-Impressionist and Impressionist movement (Bazille being a special case, as he died in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, before the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874).

Nevertheless, if you have to choose only one painter for impressionism, Monet is the one. During his long career (he died in 1926, aged 86), he was the most consistent and prolific practitioner of Impressionism's philosophy, and the term "Impressionism" is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (French: Impression, soleil levant). This painting was presented to the public in 1874 at an exhibition organized by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon (the official state-organized exhibition), which quickly became famous as the first Impressionist exhibition.

In 1890, Claude Monet purchased a property in Giverny (Normandy) where, from 1893, he started to create a "water garden": a pond spanned by a footbridge (a reference to Japanese art). In 1899, Monet started the Japanese bridge series, and the year after, his blooming waterlily pond became the dominant theme of his work. Monet focused his research on pictorial space. From 1905, he abandoned all reference to perspective in his water lily works. In total, Monet painted more than 300 Water Lilies canvases, many of them in large formats.

The Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume collections

From modest origins, Paul Guillaume became a major art dealer in the early 20th century. His interest in African sculpture attracted the attention of Guillaume Apollinaire, who introduced him to many of the artists working in Paris, such as Matisse and Picasso.

Guillaume was the art dealer of Chaïm Soutine and Amedeo Modigliani, who, despite being very different, shared a short but strong friendship.

After the death of Paul Guillaume in 1934, his collection passed into the hands of his wife, Domenica, who later married the architect Jean Walter. Paul Guillaume's initial avant-garde collection then became a little tamer with the sale of the most avant-garde works and the purchase of more "classical" paintings, for example many Renoir masterpieces.

Since their renovation in 2020, the rooms of the Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume Collection have had a new hanging focusing on the Modernist aspect of the collection.

Paul Guillaume by Amedeo Modigliani 1916 typ

Paul Guillaume by Amedeo Modigliani. Modigliani painted many portraits of Paul Guillaume; this one is in the Museo del Novecento (Milan). In our opinion, the best one is the one at the Orangerie.

Chaim Soutine by Amedeo Modigliani 1917 nga

Chaim Soutine by Amedeo Modigliani (Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington). Soutine and Modigliani are considered the founders in 1910 of the School of Paris.

Things to Know Before Booking

Meeting Point

Close to the Orangerie Museum entrance (exact location on the tour confirmation voucher).
Access: Métro Line 1 station Concorde.

Orangerie Museum-Tour Attention Points

Prices do not include food, drinks, or any other extra services.
Tour duration and content are indicative. Visits may vary due to contingencies.
A private tour means a tour for you & your party only, not that the Orangerie Museum is privatized.
Skip-the-line ticket means a ticket bought online; nevertheless, you still have to stand in line with other skip-the-line ticket holders for security checks.
Refund: if we cannot do the tour for any reason, we refund the tour, but never your museum tickets.

Book Your Private Tour of The Orangerie Museum

Caution: The Orangerie Museum Tour is sold without museum tickets. It is your responsibility to buy your Orangerie Museum tickets. Buy your skip-the-line online museum tickets once you have your Broaden Horizons tour confirmation. You must have your skip-the-line online tickets on the day of the tour. If you don't have them, we won't be able to do the tour, and you won't be refunded.