by Linda Lappin

The Musée d’Orsay is packed as usual over the holidays, with visitors swarming in and out of rooms displaying the spellbinding animal portraits of  Rosa Bonheur, the nineteenth century artist who captured the wild gaze of beasts and deflected them to the viewer. My goal today, instead, is a little red room on the ground floor, Salle 6, which holds one of the most notorious if rarely viewed paintings in the world: L’Origine du monde, by Gustave Courbet, created in 1866. Continue reading “L’Origine” →