Excellent value, 29 Aug 2008
I purchased this volume for a trip with a school party (GCSE & A level) that included the Musée d'Orsay and the Louvre.

The book, although weighty, is ideally shaped to live in a handbag, manbag, or even a roomy pocket (although in that case, get the Louvre one as well and balance yourself so as not to look like Quasimodo...).

The pictures are clear, the notes are superb, and I certainly wouldn't have been without it. Hundreds of pictures, hundreds of pages. All for £7 or so. Brilliant.

Excellent value, 29 Aug 2008
I purchased this volume for a trip with a school party (GCSE & A level) that included the Musée d'Orsay and the Louvre.

The book, although weighty, is ideally shaped to live in a handbag, manbag, or even a roomy pocket (although in that case, get the Louvre one as well and balance yourself so as not to look like Quasimodo...).

The pictures are clear, the notes are superb, and I certainly wouldn't have been without it. Hundreds of pictures, hundreds of pages. All for £7 or so. Brilliant.

Excellent book with historical perspective and insight, 18 Apr 1999
Vanina Costa's book on the Musee D'Orsay is the kind of book that makes you interested in something that you were only vaguely acquainted with before you read it. 12 paintings by twelve 19th century painters featured at the Musee D'Orsay are analyzed for their style and content, with a sort of expert detail that you would not expect to see in a guidebook to a museum. The one regret I have is that Renoir was not included in this survey, but we get to learn about Seurat, Courbet and Vuillard as well as Monet, Manet, Van Gogh , Degas, Cezanne and Gaughin. A really good read that should be made widely available to patrons of art museums across North America , Europe and Japan and elsewhere in Asia.