Musée de l’Orangerie

If you want a museum that you can whisk through in an hour, this is the one for you. The main attraction is Monet’s Water Lilies series, which the master gifted to France in 1922. The building itself is also impressive, and was initially used as winter storage for orange trees surrounding the garden in the Tuileries Palace. The columns framing the doorways are modeled after the same ones at the Tuileries Palace. After admiring the eight compositions forming the Water Lilies (which spans two, oval-shaped rooms), stroll through the Jean Walter-Paul Guillaume collection, which includes 146 paintings by some of France’s most famous artists: Matisse, Monet and Cézanne.