Five Paris Art Museums Worth the Museum Pass

Paris is a fashion city, and it is also the city artists came to from the rest of Europe so the work could be seen. I am not one of those artists. I am the person who still crosses town for a room of paintings, and these five museums are the ones that changed how I look at the city. Their rooms are the legacy. The queue is just the tax.

This is not every gallery in Paris. It is a visiting guide to the five I would still plan a trip around: what each building is, which works earn the stop, and when the day actually works. If the brief is European galleries rather than a Paris week, the wider set is in Top 10 Classical Art Galleries in the World. The London cousin is the London museum guide.

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Whether the Paris Museum Pass is worth it

The pass is the right tool if you are going to use it on consecutive days, and a wasted card if it sits in a pocket while you wander. It covers fifty-odd museums and monuments in Paris and the surroundings, one entry each, and the clock starts at the first visit rather than on the morning you bought it. Two, four, and six days are the lengths. On the official page, the adult prices were recently €85, €105, and €125. They move, and the old €55 line is how this page used to mislead people. Check parismuseumpass.fr before you buy, or take the GetYourGuide listing only if you want the pass in the same checkout as a timed slot.

Under-18s, and EU residents under 26, are often free at the national museums, so do not buy them a pass out of habit. The pass skips the ticket desk. It does not skip a timed reservation where a museum demands one, and the Louvre is the museum that catches people. Book the slot, then let the pass cover the ticket. Write the name and the first-visit date on a paper pass if that is what you are holding. An e-ticket does the same job at the barrier.

The all-in city passes that bundle the metro and a restaurant discount are a different product. In the centre I still walk more than I ride, so the museum pass is the one that matches this list. Buy it online, at the airport tourist desks, or at a museum ticket window if you have left it late.

What the pass actually opens, beyond these five, includes the Arc de Triomphe, Sainte-Chapelle, the Panthéon, the Conciergerie, and the palaces. Versailles is the add-on that makes a four-day pass make sense, and that day is in the Versailles guide. Fontainebleau takes the same pass and a different train, written up in Fontainebleau.

A two-day cut that still breathes: the Louvre in the morning, Rodin when Denon has worn you out, Orsay while the light is in the old station, the Orangerie because it sits in the Tuileries on the way, and the Pompidou if a midweek late opening is still on the board. Day two can be Versailles instead of a fifth museum. Check the late nights before you promise yourself a 9 p.m. Pompidou. They move.

Musée du Louvre

The Louvre goes first because it is the largest museum in the world, and because the argument starts in the courtyard. I. M. Pei’s pyramid, finished in 1989, sits in the middle of a palace that Philippe Auguste began in the twelfth century as a fort. Charles V turned it into a residence in the fourteenth century. It stayed the political centre of France until the court left for Versailles, and it opened as a museum in 1793, after the Revolution. You either accept the glass or you spend the queue complaining about it. I accept it. The complaint does not get you to the paintings faster.

The collection runs to something like 420,000 works, from the ancient Near East to the mid-nineteenth century, with on the order of 13,000 on show. Departments cover Near Eastern, Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities, the medieval Louvre, paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, prints and drawings, and Islamic art. Temporary shows are the reason to come back. The Islamic galleries, objects in ceramic, metal, wood, ivory and carpet from the Mediterranean to India, and from the seventh to the nineteenth century, are the rooms people skip on the way to the Mona Lisa and then wish they had not.

The wings are Sully, Denon, and Richelieu. Denon is the one the crowds mean. Richelieu is the wing I would send you to once Denon has done its job: Cour Marly and the French sculpture courts, the Mesopotamian rooms, the Napoléon III apartments, the Petite Galerie, and a crowd that has gone to look at a rope barrier instead. Sully holds the medieval bones of the building, including the old moat on the lower level, which most people walk over.

The three icons, if a morning is all you have, are the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace at the top of the Daru staircase, and the Mona Lisa. They are also in the galleries piece. What I would not do is spend the pass in front of that glass.

The rest of the visit is a floor, not a checklist. On the lower ground, the Horses of Marly and the medieval moat in Sully, and the sense of the fortress under the palace. On the ground floor, the colossal Ramesses II, the Code of Hammurabi, Canova’s Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, and the Cycladic idol from around 2700 BC, which is easy to miss because it is small and the Egyptian rooms are not. On the first floor, the Napoléon III apartments, the Seated Scribe, David’s Coronation of Napoleon, Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana hanging in the same room as the Mona Lisa and often the better picture, Puget’s Milon de Crotone, and Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, carved for the tomb of Julius II and never installed there. On the second floor, the French and Northern rooms: Dürer’s self-portrait, Vermeer’s Lacemaker, the presumed portrait of Gabrielle d’Estrées and her sister, Ingres’s Turkish Bath, and the Etruscan Sarcophagus of the Spouses if you still have the patience for a couple reclining at a banquet.

Go early, with the timed slot already booked. Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre, lines 1, 7, and 14, is the metro. Shoulders and a plan beat a heroic attempt to see every wing. Denon first, Richelieu if the legs allow, Sully for the moat if you care how the building began.

Le Louvre highlights and must-sees: 

Lower Ground Floor – Sculptures, Egyptian Antiquities, History of the Louvre, The Medieval Louvre

• • Horses of Marly
  • Medieval Moat
  • Château de Marly is located in one of my favorite halls on the 1st floor in Richelieu. 
  • Sainte Marie-Madeleine is a Germanic sculpture on the 1st floor in Denon.
  • Le Louvre’s trench is one of its oldest features that could be easily ignored. See them on the B1 floor in Sully

Ground Floor – Sculptures, Near Eastern Antiquities, Egyptian Antiquities, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities

• • Colossal Statue of Ramesses II
  • Code of Hammurabi
  • Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss is a great work by Italian sculptor Antonio Canova, and it’s a romantic depiction of the Roman myth between Psyche and Cupid. Their elegant posture was very impressive. 
  • Captive
  • Sculpture from Chuicuaro
  • Idole Cycladique was unearthed in Cycladic, Greece, and its artwork is from 2,700 BC! 

1st Floor – Decorative Arts, Egyptian Antiquities, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Antiquities, Paintings, Prints, and Drawings

• • Napoleon II Apartments
  • Seated Scribe
  • The consecration of the Emperor Napoleon
  • The Wedding Feast at Cana
  • Milton de Crotona is a sculpture by famous sculptor Puget depicting ancient Greek Olympic athlete Milo’s arm stuck in a tree, and finally got eaten by a wolf. The expression of the sculpture is really good.
  • L’Esclave is a Renaissance sculpture created by Michelangelo in Italy. It was originally planned for Pope Julius II’s tomb; the work was later canceled due to financial troubles; it was sold to the Louvre. 

2nd Floor – French paintings, Prints, and French Drawings; German, Flemish, Dutch, Belgian, Russian, Swiss, and Scandinavian Paintings 

• • Durer Self-portrait
  • The Lacemaker
  • The Card-sharper
  • The Turkish Bath
  • Sarcophagus of the Spouses was an exhibit in the necropolis section. It depicts a married couple reclining at a banquet together in the afterlife and was found in 19th-century excavations. 

In regard to paintings, there are so much more to see! Le Radeau de la Méduse, The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David, Le Pied-bot by Josèphe de Ribera, Portrait présumé de Gabrielle d’Estrées et de sa sœur la duchesse de Villars, and La Liberté guidant le peuple by Eugène Delacroix, La Dentellière by Jan Vermeer, Le Tricheur by George de Latour.

Musée d’Orsay

Orsay is a former station on the Left Bank, opened as a museum in 1986, and the building is half the visit. Victor Laloux’s iron-and-glass train shed was meant to sit politely opposite the Louvre, across the river from the Tuileries, and it does, until you are inside and the nave gives the game away. The collection is French art from 1848 to 1914, which is why it feels like the Louvre’s next chapter rather than a rival.

Start with sculpture in the nave, then work up to the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist galleries on the top floor. Van Gogh’s self-portrait is the picture I still stop for. The clock window is the other stop, and the café behind it is better than a museum café needs to be, with the city framed in the glass. If you only have one painting afternoon after the Louvre, make it this one rather than a second Denon loop.

The RER C stops at Musée d’Orsay. The same line continues toward Versailles, which is why the pass and the Versailles day belong in the same week. Midweek is kinder than a Sunday. The top floor fills once the tour groups have finished the Louvre and come across the river.

Musée de l’Orangerie

The Orangerie is the museum that is really one painting, or rather two oval rooms of one idea. Monet gave the Nymphéas to France as a place to stand inside the water lilies rather than look at them from a corridor, and the 2006 reopening got that architecture right. White, oval, daylight, a cycle painted after the First World War and installed so the rooms curve with the pond at Giverny. It is a short visit, which is the point. Do not rush the ovals for the downstairs galleries. The painting is the building.

Downstairs, the Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume collection is the School of Paris at a scale you can finish: Cézanne, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani, a room of pictures that would be a destination anywhere else and here are the coda. Do it after Orsay, not instead of Orsay. The building sits at the west end of the Tuileries, by Place de la Concorde, and it is the easiest add-on on this list. Concorde is the metro. Bags are strict, and the ovals are quieter in the first hour.

Musée Rodin

Rodin is the breather, and it is also a complete museum. The Hôtel Biron, an eighteenth-century mansion the sculptor used as a studio, opened as a museum in 1919. The rooms still feel like a house. More than a hundred works are spread between the interiors and the garden, marble and bronze, with The Thinker on the lawn as the picture everyone comes for. The Burghers of Calais and the studies for Balzac repay a slower loop once the photograph is done. The Gates of Hell, if it is on the garden front that day, is the work the smaller figures keep quoting.

I would put Rodin between the Louvre and Orsay, or at the end of a Denon morning, when another palace would be unkind. The garden is doing as much work as the plinths, and it closes earlier than the house in the short months, so check the board if you are arriving after four. Varenne, on line 13, is the metro. Invalides is a short walk if you are already on that side of the river.

Centre Pompidou

The Pompidou is the counterweight, and for the next few years it is a closed one. The Beaubourg building shut on 22 September 2025 for a renovation that the museum itself schedules through 2030. Asbestos in the façade, corrosion in the structure, access, energy, and a rethink of the rooms: that is the work. Do not buy a pass, or a timed slot, for the main building. It will not let you in.

I am leaving the visit here because the building is still the reason the list exists, and because a reader landing on this page in 2027 should not think the pipes have vanished. Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers turned the escalators outward, the centre opened in 1977, and people still argue about it in the way they argue about the pyramid. The rooms covering roughly 1965 to 1980 were the ones I went back for, work from more than fifty countries rather than a single movement with a French name. Matisse’s La Blouse roumaine was the picture that stopped the modern wing feeling like a theory. The upper balcony was the other reason to go up: sculpture out in the air — Miró, Richier, Ernst — and a view over the roofs that earned the escalator.

Until the doors open again, the collection is travelling. The museum’s Constellation programme is sending shows to partner rooms in France and abroad, including the Grand Palais and Centre Pompidou-Metz, and a new conservation and exhibition site in Massy is planned for 2027. Check the Centre Pompidou site for where a given show has landed. In Paris itself, the Pinault collection at the Bourse de Commerce is the contemporary room that is actually open, and it sits in the Paris attractions update. It does not replace Beaubourg. It is what you can walk into.

How I would actually spend the days

Day one is the Louvre with a timed slot, Denon for the three icons and the Cana, Richelieu if the legs allow, then Rodin before the garden closes. Day two is Orsay, then the Orangerie ovals, then the Pompidou balcony if the pass still has hours on it. A third day, if you bought four, is Versailles rather than a second Louvre. The southern France guides are a different trip, and they live in the France archives when the week is no longer about museum queues.

The five are enough. The pass is only worth it if those days are real.