The Musee de la Marine 1-27-16

Both of us felt good enough to get out today and the weather was good so we went over to the Musee de la Marine.  It is the museum of the Navy and has exhibits that include paintings, models and other assorted paraphernalia associated therewith.  It is a wonderful museum, the scale models of the various warships from the 17th through 20th centuries are superb.  I don't have a sailing background nor does Deb but the models are so beautiful that we couldn't help but love them.
The first room contained the royal galley of Napoleon and his nephew Napoleon III, it's around 60 feet long, with oars for 20 and a royal salon in the rear.  It was big enough that in the time of Napoleon III they towed it with a steam barge until they got close to where the reviewing stand would be before they started rowing.

The second room focued on figureheads and the offerings are really appealing,  it's hard to believe how large some of them can be. I mean 10-15 feet high.  We learned that for the smaller ships, around 70 guns or less the figureheads were almost alway women, but for the major ships of the line up to 120 guns or more it was men and the gods from antiquity.








After that most of the next 4-5 rooms focused on marine paintings and the rewriting of French naval history relative to England.  Imagine a painting that shows a French ship of the line just on the verge of boarding Nelson's flagship, the Victory, at Trafalgar.  If only it hadn't been for the perfidious English ship that attacked them from the other side!  They also show Nelson being shot by the
 French sharpshooter, which really did happen.  He's about 1/2 inch tall on a painting that is easily 4 feet high by 6 feet long.  Of course it was painted by a contemporary and they were trying to make the best of a bad situation and propagandise for Napoleon I.  There were others that took a similar approach.

However there were also several beautiful paintings of French ports from the 1800's by Vernet that were exceptional.  The one he painted of La Rochelle looked just the like the harbor we saw when we were out there early in the summer.  The ones of Bordeaux looked very much the the Bordeaux skyline of today as well.
The large focus of the first part of the museum was military, but in the second there was a combination of both military and civilian, so there were models of merchant, passenger, and freighters.  It was a very enjoyable few hours visit.


It was turning dark when we left so we waited a few minutes and got a close up view of the Tour Eiffel lit up and sparkling before we caught a bus over to the Metro.  We had dinner at our neighborhood restaurant, Art et Science Reuniss before heading back to the apartment.