As good as museums get.

One of the four great art museums in the western hemisphere (The National Gallery – London, The Uffizi – Florence, The Metropolitan Museum of Art – New York being the others) it’s often said you could visit The Louvre in Paris daily for a year and still only experience a fraction of what it has to offer. Housed in a magnificent palace, visiting The Louvre is an essential destination on any tour of the world’s greatest art and sculpture collections.

First, it’s essential to arrive by Metro at The Louvre stop, as the station is decorated with glass encased sculpures. The prevailing memory I have, after buying my ticket, is the scent of oil paint, for the Louvre was full of copyists seeking to improve their skills.

The beautiful cobbled yard in the last image was destroyed in 1989 by an execrable excrescence known as The Pyramid, designed by I. M. Pei, an architect not usually known for bad taste, as his JFK Library in Boston and East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. attest. Quite how this monstrosity is meant to fit in with the French Renaissance style of the museum continues to defeat understanding.

All taken on a Leica M3, 35mm Summaron and 90mm Elmar lenses on TriX, ‘scanned’ on a Nikon D800.