| Don't miss the covetable little Kaganovitch collection (rooms 49 & 50) on your way down to the middle level, where the flow of the painting section continues with Vuillard and Bonnard (rooms 71 & 72), tucked away behind Pompon's irresistible sculpture of a polar bear, on the rue de Lille side of the railway chamber. Vuillard and Bonnard began their careers as part of an Art Nouveau group known as the Nabis, and strong Japanese influences can be seen in Vuillard's decorative screen, Jardins Publics (1894) and Bonnard's La Partie de Croquet (1892). The Impressionist interest in light is still evident, but it seems subservient to a highly distinctive palette, with colours that are at once muted and intense. On the far side of this level, overlooking the Seine (rooms 55–58), you can see a less familiar side of late-nineteenth-century painting, with large-scale, epic, naturalist works such as Detaille's stirring Le Rêve (1888) and Cormon's Caïn (1880), as well as the famously effete Portrait of Marcel Proust by Jacques-Emile Blanche. The painting collection ends with a troubling handful of international Symbolist paintings: room 60, overlooking the Seine, is dominated by the almost formless wash of leaves and petals that constitutes Klimt's Rosiers sous les Arbres, along with some of Munch's lesser-known works. On the parallel sculpture terraces, nineteenth-century marbles on the Seine side face early twentieth-century pieces across the divide, but the Rodin terrace bridging the two puts almost everything else to shame. Rodin's Ugolin is even grimmer than Carpeaux's, immediately below, while his Fugit Amor, a response to his pupil and lover Camille Claudel's L'Age Mûr, adjacent, is a powerful image of the end of their liaison. It's a pity, but few visitors will have energy left for the half-dozen rooms of superb Art Nouveau furniture and objets.
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