The Musée d'Orsay is a multi-discipline museum, devoted to art from the second half of the 19th century. This book brings together 150 of the museum's most beautiful works of sculpture.

Featuring works by some of the best-known post-impressionist artists, this book is published in conjunction with a major exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. Masterpieces includes multiple works by Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Paul Cezanne, Georges Seurat, Pierre Bonnard, Claude Monet, and Maurice Denis, among others.

"The Musée d'Orsay, located at the heart of Paris in a former railway station across the river from the Louvre and the Tuileries, has attracted thousands of visitors daily since it opened in 1986. It is a national museum devoted to the art of the second half of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th, between the emergence of realism in 1848 and the beginnings of fauvism in 1905. While it covers all fields of artistic creativity, the museum owes much of its fame to its Impressionist collections, formed over more than a century, and the masterpieces of Manet, Monet, Renoir, Gauguin, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. However, they hang close to the late works of Corot, Ingres and Delacroix, while Courbet unquestionably emerges as the initiator of the Impressionist avant-garde. The upholders of tradition, the advocates of official, academic and naturalistic art, are also exhibited, in the form of paintings by Cabanel, Cormon and Bastien-Lepage. Works acquired in recent years have made possible to improve the representation of the French school, especially for artists such as Bonnard and the Nabis. But the Musée d'Orsay does not disregard foreign schools, and a special effort has been made to supplement a collection initiated around 1890. Alongside Whistler's masterpiece we now find major works by Burne-Jones, Böcklin, Klimt, Munch, Hodler, Hammershøi and many others. After an introduction which outlines the history of the collections and explains the chronological approach, the authors of the work -- curators at the museum -- analyse the pictorial creative output of this wonderfully rich and diverse period." -- Provided by publisher

The paintings of the Musée d'Orsay. An exceptional collection. Built up over time through purchases by the state, donations and bequests from artists, collectors and patrons, and also thanks to an active acquisitions policy, the Musée d'Orsay's collection of pictures today constitutes an exceptional holding represented by the greatest names and schools of painting between 1848 and 1914: - official art (history painting, portraits and classic landscapes); - symbolism (Moreau, Puvis de Chavannes, Redon); - realism (Courbet, Fantin-Latour); - the Barbizon school (Corot, Millet, Rousseau); - impressionism (Caillebotte, Cézanne, Degas, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley); - post-impressionism (Seurat, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec); - the Nabis (Bonnard, Denis, Vuillard). For its new hanging in the picture galleries, the Musée d'Orsay is highlighting its extraordinary masterpieces to offer the public an increasingly complete yet fresh survey of that fruitful and varied era, one of the most creative and abundant in the history of art. Published for this occasion, the volume presents 300 works in an order that is both chronological and thematic, thereby offering a comprehensive overview of the history of painting of the period, with the didactic intent of rendering it accessible to the widest possible public.