| The ground floor, under the great glass arch, is devoted to pre-1870 work, with a double row of sculptures running down the central aisle like railway tracks, and paintings in the odd little bunkers on either side. Chief among the mid-nineteenth-century sculptors in the central aisle is Carpeaux, whose Ugolin shows the damned Count Ugolino, from Dante's Divine Comedy, gnawing at his fingers with pain and hunger as he contemplates consuming the bodies of his dying children. The original plaster of the Four Quarters of the World Bearing the Celestial Sphere, the bronze version of which stands at the foot of the Jardin du Luxembourg, is also his. Nearby, Charles Cordier's polychrome busts of black Africans, in bronze and coloured stone, seem strangely explicit to modern eyes. On the south side of this level, towards rue de Lille, the first set of rooms (1–3) is dedicated to Ingres, Delacroix – the bulk of whose work is in the Louvre – and the serious-minded works of the painters acceptable to the mid-nineteenth century salons; just beyond (rooms 11–13) are the relatively wacky works of Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau and the younger Degas. The influential Barbizon school and the Realists are showcased on the Seine side (rooms 4–7), with canvases by Daumier, Corot, Millet and Courbet which depart from the accepted norms of moralism and idealization of the past. The soft-toned landscapes by Millet and Corot, and quickly executed scenes by Daubigny, such as his La Neige, were influential on later, avowed Impressionists. In room 7, Courbet's L'Origine du Monde has the power to shock even contemporary audiences. The explicit, nude female torso was acquired from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who had had it screened behind a decorative panel. Just a few steps away, room 14 explodes with the early controversies of Monet's violently light-filled Femmes au Jardin (1867) and Manet's provocative Olympia (1863), which heralded the arrival of Impressionism. The latter was as controversial in its day for its colour contrasts and sensual surfaces as for the portrayal of Olympia as a high-class whore who returns the stares of her audience with a look of insolent defiance.
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