David's Diary: Sunday, August 5, 2001

Louvre, Paris

Entrance to the Louvre is free the first Sunday of every month. Today being the first Sunday of August, we decided to visit the Louvre. We were up early, on the train, and at the palace by 10:00 AM where we entered a line more than a kilometer long to enter the museum. Having made the journey we waited patiently until we finally entered the museum at Pei's pyramid in the middle of the courtyard made by the wings of the palace.

The original fortress dates from 1200 and we visited the basement where you can see some of the original fortress walls. By the mid-16th century it had been rebuilt as a royal palace and it became a museum in 1793. One of the most famous museums in the world, the Louvre is also one of the largest. Our goal was to have a short visit and only focus on a few things. We purchased the book Destination Louvre A Guide Tour from the Louvre bookshop to keep us on track.

We did not follow the tour exactly, since we knew that Jocelyn, Kevin, and Allen were keen to see the Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece. It took us some time to navigate into the Denon wing of the museum. It is terribly hard not to get distracted as you pass hundreds of sculptures and paintings, but we stuck with the suggestions in our tour book and before we knew it we were looking at the Mona Lisa. One always imagines that you'll be able to stand back and admire the Mona Lisa, contemplating the sad look in the model's eyes and that enigmatic smile. The reality is that the painting is encased in glass and you have to fight your way through hundreds of people to even get a glimpse. Leonardo spent years painting the portrait, even taking with him on all of his travels.

By this point we had waited in line for over an hour and been in the museum longer than that and we had three hungry children to look after. We decided to stop in the Louvre for lunch where most of our savings with free entry were consumed by the expensive prices of the Louvre Cafe. But food and rest meant that we had a small amount of energy to continue through the museum.

Rubens Room

We visited the Big Sphinx, the Borghese Gladiator, and the Venus of Milo. Our visit to the original fortress foundations was probably the part most enjoyed by the children.

Karalee and I wanted to see Vermeer's the Astronomer, which was located in the Richelieu wing. On the way we got lost and ended up viewing Napoléon III's Apartments. While not in our guidebook for a first time tour, all of us enjoyed seeing the opulence and decoration of the apartments. A good example of how getting lost when being a tourist can often lead to more interesting discoveries.

We eventually found the Vermeer, but not before a visit to Rubens Room. This is one of the most impressive achievements in the history of painting. Queen Marie de Médicis, wife of Henri IV, commissioned Rubens to paint twenty-four great canvases to illustrate the principle events in her life. Rubens painted all of them in a three-year period starting in 1622. The entire group of paintings now hangs together in the Louvre and make for a fantastic display. The children were tired so we only had a short time to visit Rubens Room. In our next visit to the Louvre I would like to spend an hour in this one room. We spent more than four hours in the museum, probably too long for one visit, but the Louvre has so much to see that it is easy to see the time slip away.