The Musée d’Orsay: Four on a Bench (#693)

There are moments when you go to a museum to look at the paintings.

And there are moments when the people looking at the paintings become every bit as interesting as the paintings themselves.

This was one of those moments.

We were in the Musée d’Orsay, in the Impressionist galleries, along with what appeared to be half the population of Paris and a substantial proportion of the tourists visiting Europe.

The galleries were packed.

People moved slowly from room to room in a great human procession. There were tour groups following raised umbrellas, people wearing headphones, people consulting maps, people photographing paintings, people photographing themselves in front of paintings, and occasionally someone simply standing still and actually looking at one.

Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissarro.

Names that had once represented a rebellion against the artistic establishment were now attracting crowds worthy of a rock concert.

And then I saw the family.

Four of them, sitting side by side on a clear hard plastic bench.

Father. Mother. Two daughters.

At least, that was my assumption. I knew nothing about them. I never spoke to them. I don't know where they came from or where they were going next.

But there was something about them that made me stop.

They had had enough.

Not disastrously enough.

Not get me out of this museum immediately enough.

Just enough.

They sat with their backs to me, facing the river of humanity flowing through the doorway ahead.

The father leaned forward, elbows toward his knees, in the universal posture of a man who had discovered that there are considerably more Impressionist paintings than he had previously imagined.

Beside him sat one daughter, pink shirt, long dark hair.

Then the other, upright, braided hair, brown top.

And finally their mother, white blouse, red skirt, sitting slightly apart at the end of the bench.

Four people.

Four postures.

Four different responses to the Musée d'Orsay.

Museum Fatigue

There is a phenomenon that museums rarely mention in their brochures.

Museum fatigue.

It is real.

You begin magnificently. You enter determined to absorb civilization. You read every label. You examine the brushwork.

You stand back. You move closer. You discuss perspective.

You say things like, Look at what Monet has done with the light.

Then, somewhere around Room 17, things begin to deteriorate.

The labels become shorter.

Your examinations become quicker.

Monet's treatment of light remains impressive, but the availability of somewhere to sit begins to seem equally significant.

Eventually you spot a bench.

A museum bench is not merely furniture.

After two hours in a major European museum, it is an oasis.

And these four had found one.

Meanwhile, the Impressionists Waited

What amused me most was what was happening beyond them.

The crowd continued forward.

Somewhere ahead hung paintings worth tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of dollars.

Paintings reproduced in books, calendars, posters and postcards throughout the world.

People had traveled thousands of miles to see them.

And yet, at that particular moment, the four people on the bench were looking at none of them.

They were looking at the crowd.

Or perhaps at nothing at all.

And I found myself doing exactly the same thing.

I had stopped looking at the Impressionists.

I was looking at them.

Perhaps the Impressionists Would Have Understood

The more I thought about it, the more appropriate the scene became.

The Impressionists were fascinated by ordinary life.

They painted cafés and railway stations. Women reading. People dancing. Families having lunch. Boats on rivers. Men drinking. Women sitting. People walking along Parisian boulevards.

Degas painted people at the races and women rehearsing ballet.

Renoir painted friends eating and drinking.

Monet painted railway stations filled with steam.

They took the ordinary and said:

Look at this.

This matters too.

Perhaps, had Degas been standing where I was standing, he might have ignored the paintings as well.

He might have sketched the family on the bench.

Four backs. A braid. A splash of pink. A brilliant red skirt. The gleaming surface of the seat.

And behind them, the blurred movement of the crowd.

It would have been a thoroughly Impressionist subject.

The Family Portrait Nobody Posed For

That is what I like about the picture of this family.

Nobody is performing for the camera. Nobody is smiling because someone has said, Smile! Nobody has rearranged themselves. Nobody is trying to create a memory.

They are simply there.

Together.

And because of that, the photograph feels more like a family portrait than many carefully arranged family photographs do.

The father slumps. The daughters sit. The mother rests. Around them Paris surges forward.

For a few minutes, however, the four of them have stepped out of the current.

They have stopped.

Perhaps they had been discussing the paintings. Perhaps they were deciding where to have lunch. Perhaps somebody had said, I need to sit down. Perhaps nobody had said anything at all.

That possibility appeals to me most.

Families don't always need to talk.

Sometimes being together means simply sitting beside one another on a bench.

Art in Front of the Paintings

Eventually they would have stood up. The father would straighten his back. Someone would say, Ready?

Perhaps another would answer, Not yet.

And eventually they would disappear through the doorway and become part of the crowd again.

I would never see them again.

They would never know that someone behind them had noticed this tiny interval in their day.

But I had.

And I took the photograph.

Later, looking at it, I realized that it captured something I increasingly enjoy about traveling.

The famous things matter. Of course they do.

You go to the Musée d'Orsay to see Monet, Renoir, Degas and Van Gogh.

But sometimes the memories that remain are not the things mentioned in the guidebook.

They are the things happening beside them. A waiter setting a table. A child chasing a pigeon. An elderly couple holding hands. A family eating lunch. Four people sitting on a bench.

Perhaps that is another lesson the Impressionists left us.

They taught us that beauty does not always announce itself.

Sometimes it is monumental.

Sometimes it hangs in a gilded frame.

And sometimes, in the middle of one of the world's great museums, it is simply a family sitting together because their feet hurt.

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