Musée de l'Orangerie

Claude Monet spent the last decade of his life painting eight massive water lily murals, and then he designed the rooms to hold them. That's not an exaggeration — Monet worked with the architect Camille Lefèvre to create two oval rooms in this former greenhouse, specifying the dimensions, the natural light from above, and the curved walls so that the paintings would surround the viewer completely. He wanted you to feel like you were standing inside his garden at Giverny.

Monet donated the paintings to the French state the day after the Armistice in 1918, as a monument to peace. He spent eight more years perfecting them, nearly blind from cataracts, working with magnifying glasses and labeling his paint tubes because he could no longer distinguish colors. He died in December 1926, and the installation opened five months later. Most of his friends thought the paintings were a mess — abstract blurs by a man who could barely see. Now they're considered the first great works of abstract art, a bridge between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism.

The Orangerie was originally built in 1852 as a winter shelter for the orange trees of the Tuileries gardens. In the basement, there's a superb collection of early 20th-century paintings by Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Modigliani from the collection of Paul Guillaume and his wife Domenica.

After a major renovation completed in 2006, the upper galleries were restored to Monet's original vision, with natural light flooding the oval rooms. Visiting early in the morning, when the museum first opens and the rooms are nearly empty, is one of the most transcendent art experiences in the world.