I was in Paris in March and had a ticket for this. I was at the museum an hour before my booked time slot. The square in front of the entrance was one gigantic queue, and when I asked at the front I was told that they were still processing people who had booked a time slot an hour before that. I decided not to stand around in the rain for two hours for a very dubious chance to get what I had paid for. There are no refunds for any reason ever, of course.<p>It's a shame because when I lived in Paris the Musée d'Orsay was one of my favorites. Apparently management changed sometime in the last few years, and ticket sales are higher than ever. But only because it has turned into yet another tourist trap.
I visited a small museum near where I live the other day (The Kröller-Müller Museum, in the Netherlands), the founder happened to pick up quite a few Van Gogh paintings over her collecting, including one of my favourites (Terrasse du Café le Soir), but also a lot of other incredible works by him. One of the things that stood out to me is how the oil is so thickly layered in some paintings. It's most obvious in Cypresses and Two Women -- the painting is so rich with oil paint (so I guess it was done in a period when he could afford plenty of materials) the trees all have a ridged texture to them.<p>It's just another dimension to his art, but it really grabbed me. It's not something that would be easy to replicate in a VR exhibition, I don't think.