the Louvre | Seine | first artist | Paris | France

I returned to the Musée d'Orsay on a gray afternoon. It is a former train station located on the banks of the Seine, just a short walk from the more famous and traditional Louvre. The massive open spaces of the bottom floors are given to statuary and oversize paintings. I took the escalator up to the fifth level, where the Impressionists are displayed. In my hand was a map of the museum, showing the rooms where specific works of art could be seen. But I wanted to be surprised and so I did not consult it. I wanted to see if the van Gogh paintings would exert that same raw emotional tug when I chanced upon them.

Cézanne was the first artist on display. His pale, literal pastels would prove to be a warm-up for the bright blues and vivid yellows favored by van Gogh. I wandered from room to room, not studying every painting in depth (there were just too many), focusing only on those that caught my eye. Soon I was in Room 35, a rectangular space perhaps 30 by 40 feet. The walls were beige and gray, as was the floor. Natural light filtered in from skylights. The van Goghs didn't disappoint. It would have been horrible if they had - traveling all that way to relive a memory, only to find out that it was just an invention created by time.

There were 16 on display, though just two were painted during his years in Paris. The room was jammed with schoolkids and tourists. More than one spectator was holding a camera phone up close to a painting to take a quick photo. I moved slowly from painting to painting. My personal favorite on this trip was The Siesta. It featured a man and wife napping in the shadow of a haystack following the harvest. Maybe it was the colors, maybe it was the way I felt transported to a sunny pasture somewhere in the south of France, but it was mesmerizing.

I lingered for another few hours in the Musée d'Orsay, then wandered over to the Louvre, where I spent the rest of the afternoon.