First impressions

As a huge art fan, I knew exactly what I was looking forward to most about my trip to Paris: visiting the Musée d'Orsay. 【小题1】 (house) in an old railway building, this world-famous art museum features some of the best-known paintings from the Impressionist movement of the 19th century.

As I wandered through the Impressionist gallery, I 【小题2】 (appreciate) masterpieces like The Ballet Class and The Card Players. Even though I had admired them hundreds of times on my computer screen, 【小题3】 could have prepared me for the wonder I felt when I finally laid eyes on the real thing. While it was hard 【小题4】 (pick) a favourite painting out of so many amazing works, the artists who made the deepest 【小题5】 (impress) on me were two of the greatest Impressionist painters, Claude Mone Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

I could see from Monet's works that he was 【小题6】 (great) inspired by nature. In the last three decades of his life he painted mostly scenes from his garden. One of these scenes 【小题7】(show) in the famous piece Blue Water Lilies, 【小题8】 I studied for quite a while in the gallery. I couldn't believe it when I heard he did around 250 paintings of the same water lily pond, all 【小题9】 different colores and styles. It is 【小题10】 (amaze) that every time Monet studied this simple scene, he brought the pond’s beauty to the canvas in a unique way.