Musée de l'Orangerie

The Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris is best known for one immersive installation: Claude Monet's Water Lilies. Eight enormous panels wrap around two oval rooms built to the artist's own design, lit from above by natural light so the pond seems to surround you on every side. Monet conceived the cycle as a calm refuge after the First World War and gave it to France in 1922, and it remains one of the great experiences of Impressionism.

Downstairs, the Walter-Guillaume collection turns the Orangerie into a tour of early modern Paris. Works by Renoir, Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Modigliani sit alongside the thick, restless portraits of Chaim Soutine and Suzanne Valadon's The Blue Room. Together they trace what happened to French painting in the decades after Impressionism faded.

The building is small, which is part of its appeal. The two oval rooms were among the first gallery spaces in the world designed around a single artist's vision, and Monet kept reworking the panels almost to the end of his life as his eyesight failed. You can take in the Nympheas and the whole modern collection in a single focused visit, an easy pairing with a walk through the Tuileries Garden just outside the door.