Tuileries and the Orangerie: Monet's Water Lilies
Why is it significant?
Enter the Tuileries by the gate on the Concorde side and look along the gravel alleys: clipped chestnut trees, statues, green metal chairs around an octagonal pool. On your right, overlooking the river, a long, low, pale building with tall windows. Inside it, two oval rooms painted with water.
Key Facts
| Place | Tuileries and the Orangerie: Monet's Water Lilies |
|---|---|
| Address | Jardin des Tuileries, Place de la Concorde, 75001 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.86380, 2.32270 |
| Part of Walk | Triumph and Guillotine: The Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to Concorde, Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Enter the Tuileries by the gate on the Concorde side and look along the gravel alleys: clipped chestnut trees, statues, green metal chairs around an octagonal pool. On your right, overlooking the river, a long, low, pale building with tall windows. Inside it, two oval rooms painted with water.
The name Tuileries comes from the tile works, the tuileries, that stood here before Catherine de Medici began a palace on the spot in 1564. Later, André Le Nôtre redesigned the garden in the 1660s, and the story goes that the writer Charles Perrault, the author of Puss in Boots, persuaded the king's minister to keep it open to the public. Parisians have strolled here ever since.
The palace itself is gone. In May 1871, during the last days of the Paris Commune, it was set on fire, and the ruins were cleared away in the 1880s. That is why the garden seems to open onto nothing at its eastern end, straight towards the Louvre: you are looking at the space where the palace stood.
The building on the riverbank, the Orangerie, was built in 1852 to keep the garden's orange trees warm in winter. On the day after the armistice of November 1918, the old Claude Monet offered France a gift to celebrate the peace: a series of enormous paintings of his water lily pond at Giverny. He spent the rest of his life on them. They were installed here in two oval rooms lit from above, and opened to the public in 1927, a few months after his death.
Monet wanted visitors to stand in the middle and be surrounded by water, light and willows, with no corner for the eye to rest on. He called it a refuge of peaceful meditation. Now come out of the garden by the Concorde gate and cross the square to the colonnaded palace on its northern side.