Our Favorite Museum in Paris

The Musée Rodin: it's got everything. Art inside and outside; paintings and sculpture; a fascinating old mansion and a neo-gothic addition; views of the Hôtel des Invalides; greenspace; temporary exhibitions; everything!

And best of all, it inspired my mom to imitate the pose of a sculpture:

Pretty good, right? But seriously, we're big fans. Rodin's lifespan (1840-1917) covers large chunks of our favorite period of art history, and his sculptures - considered too realistic at the time - never fail to move us. We're also impressed by the transparency of the relationship between his creative and artisanal processes. Because bronze sculptures don't just come into existence, fully formed. There's a long, complicated series of steps you have to go through to get to the finished product. But I won't get into that.

The building housing most of the collection, the Hôtel Biron, is as gorgeous as the grounds, even in winter. (Sorry about that butt in the foreground.) Tourist tip: you can get into the Musée d'Orsay and the Musée Rodin on a same-day ticket and save two euros. Hey, it's something.


The ground floor and outside are devoted to the larger individual pieces. Upstairs, you get a lot of the models and drafts of characters who were to find their way into Rodin's monumental work, never finished, called La Porte d'enfer (The Gates of Hell), which is another one of the highlights of the museum's grounds.

Two final highlights of my last visit to the Musée Rodin: another instance of "life imitating art," and a piece of quasi-spontaneous expression I found outside the museum, in which, through the medium of photography, the stickers granting free admission to an art museum become art themselves.