Travelers who visits the Musée d’Orsay in Paris will not be disappointed. It’s absolutely one of my favorite European museums. These art works by Caillebotte and Degas are just some of the treasured masterpieces that you will see here.

The Floor Scrapers demand the viewer’s attention…showing a dramatic perspective. Look at the splayed stripes of the wooden floor being so laboriously scraped.

What’s different about this is that city workers had seldom been painted and this makes it a particularly unusual art for the time. The scene depicts three working class men planing the floor of a Parisian apartment (which belonged to Caillebotte himself). It was uncommon for the French painting of the period, it was unusual to depict the urban working classes. It was much more common to see paintings of the rural aristocrats.

Caillebotte’s Floor Scrapers is one of my top favorites because of the lighting and the unexpected subject matter…I find it captivating. There is something so compelling about the concentration of the men and the way in which Caillebotte uses such a limited palette to convey so many tones of browns and grays.

Being able to stand in front of many of these paintings with my daughter and was a beautiful experience. It was a privilege to stop and stand there and look, really LOOK. We are a family of dancers so of course we love Degas. Watching my little dancer stand next to Degas’ Little Dancer was unforgettable. We took in every single detail.

We were imagining that it took a long time to create little dancer sculpture. After a while, Marie (the little dancer) was probably just standing there waiting for Degas to finish. My daughter stands in fourth position next to fourteen-year-old Marie van Goethem. Judging from her practice tutu and her hairstyle, I don’t think she’s about to perform onstage; her hair is down, and she’s wearing a casual ballet outfit. Maybe she’s practicing or in the dressing room preparing herself. 

Degas has always been one of my favorite artists because he preferred to create a backstage moment with dancers rehearsing. It’s more interesting to see the process of preparing for the performance. More than the stage performance and the limelight, it was the training and rehearsals that interested him. In the piece we are standing in front of, La Classe de Danse, the rehearsal is coming to an end, dancers are exhausted, they are stretching, twisting to scratch their backs, adjusting their hair or tutu…paying little attention to the ballet master, Jules Perrot.

Seeing these pieces of art with my own little dancer at the Musée d’Orsay was an emotional connection to the human experience…it was a powerful pleasurable moment that I will always remember.