The Orsay Museum in Paris has announced that it will soon start a big expansion project. ‘Orsay Wide Open’ will extend the floor space of the museum’s administrative offices for use as exhibition galleries, plus the project will make centers for research and education. When the project completes, the whole building will display more artworks in its collection. This augurs well for visitors taking an Orsay tour in the near future.

The museum in Paris has got €20 million as a donation from an unnamed party. The Orsay Museum will make the aforesaid centers by 2024.

The new museum wing will show the permanent collection of impressionism-style and post-impressionism-style artworks, and it is slated for completion by 2026.

The Musée d’Orsay’s President, Laurence des Cars said that project would “offer visitors a comfortable experience in spacious galleries and with educational resources that enrich their understanding of our collection and the history of art and culture.”

To improve the museum’s informative offering for kids, the fourth level will have the 650-square-meter-long Education Center.

In the early parts of the 2010’s decade, the museum opened new exhibition spaces following a 24-month-long renovation project. The museum’s latest announcement comes when there is a feeling that the number of tourists is increasing beyond an ideal level in major European centers. Numerous people visit places like Paris and Amsterdam to enjoy art, so it is in the interest of European art galleries to expand to accommodate more visitors.

The announcement also comes at the time of the Coronavirus outbreak, which has created unrest among the public across the globe. The Musée du Louvre was closed just a few days ago and then it limited the entry for visitors in view of the potential calamity. The Orsay Museum too is putting new measures into effect, including limiting the everyday visitor count.

The museum building was once a railway station, known as Gare d’Orsay. The museum’s nave has the remains of that train station even today. It gives a glimpse of railway stations from the past. Years back, Gare d’Orsay was turned into a French national museum to hold a nineteenth century artwork collection. The massive clocks of the museum inspired filmmaker Martin Scorsese’s imaginative version of ‘Gare Montparnasse’ in the movie ‘Hugo’.

The national museum has undergone many renovation works since then, but this will be an even bigger expansion by the looks of it.