Paris - Visiting The Louvre Part II

Here is part 2 of visiting the Louvre in Paris last week.  I obviously could not take pictures of everything, but here's a sampling of the paintings we saw.




In walking through some of the rooms on the upper floors, I realized there were some good views of the rest of the city.  Through one particular window, I had a really great view of the Eiffel Tower.


The picture below happens to be a Rembrant.  The museum had a lot of works from Rembrant in a handful of rooms.


There were also some amazing sculptures from Mesopotamia.  This one just struck me with the detail in it.  To think that someone (probably a slave) carved this all by hand with small tools is just amazing.


Look at the detail in that beard!  And the chevrons in the "leaves" on the chest plate...


This one was with the Greek artifacts.  It was pretty interesting and you could clearly see the effects of the environment on the stone.


In the Egyptian areas, they only had partial pieces of some of the artifacts, but the museum folks were able to provide sketches of the missing pieces so you could get an idea of what the whole thing would have looked like thousands of years ago.




We couldn't pass up a picture of Rama-sees. :-)


This next area of paintings were some more Rembrants and were near the Mona Lisa.  This painting was absolutely huge.  The people in the painting were actually larger than life-sized!




I ended up not getting a picture of the Mona Lisa, but we did see it.  In that particular room, there was an area to direct the crowd toward the painting and then away from it, and it was just a huge mass of people shoved together.  Since pick-pockets are a huge problem in the museum, we decided that we did not want to put ourselves in the middle of the huge throng of people.  That was just asking for trouble!

After leaving the Louvre, we took a walk through the gardens right next to the museum.  The flowers and trees really weren't in bloom yet since it had been a cold winter, but it was still nice to walk through.


If you look closely, there are some annuals (hyacinths, daffodils, etc.) blooming.




Looking back at the Louvre from outside the gardens.


We then crossed over the Seine, which by the way, is a lot choppier and dirtier than I would have originally expected.  After I thought about it though, it is a major river through a major city, so its not really unexpected that its dirty.




After crossing the Seine, we went to the Musee D'Orsay.  There are a ton of great impressionist paintings in there, but they did not allow photography.  We spent probably 2 hours walking through that museum.

We also took a walk over to Notre Dame, but I'll share those pictures as well as our trip to the Eiffel Tower in the next post.

We did a lot of walking in the 2 days that we were in central Paris.  Based on Google Maps, we walked about 10 miles each day.  It was beautiful while we were there though.  There were a few sprinkles here and there and one afternoon there was a 20 minute downpour, but other than that, the weather was very nice.  A bit on the cool side, but not bad for those of us used to the cold northeast!


Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations