More than a dozen visits to Paris. But none to the Musee D’Orsay.

It doesn’t rise to the level of “must see” represented by, say, the Louvre. It is not an architectural marvel, in the mind of the tourist, to compare to the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame or the Arc de Triomphe or Sacre Coeur.

The Musee D’Orsay also is a bit out of the way, there on the Rive Gauche. No Metro station really handy.

Thus, I had relegated the Musee D’Orsay to the level of “boutique attraction, seen when all else has been seen and when you have time to kill.”

I’m glad I had time to kill … and now I have a museum I can recommend heartily to any visitor.

The Musee D’Orsay once was a train station. Whoever decided to turn the space into a museum had an inspired moment.

The space inside is strange and erratic but profoundly airy, thanks to the high roof from the building’s time as a transport hub.

It is not overrun, as is the Louvre, on any given day … and it has great stuff inside.

I mentioned earlier in this journey that I am not wild about art created after, say, 1900. But that mental shorthand is mostly about truly “modern” art — loosely defined as art that doesn’t look like anything.

The Musee D’Orsay has not yet reached that level. It represents art at a period — approximately 1850 into early in the 20th century — when paintings and sculpture still looked like what they were meant to depict.

It also has oodles of stuff by artistes you just want to see. Van Gogh. Monet. Manet, Renoir, Cezanne, Degas, Seurat.

These are things that are fascinating to study. Dashes of color that, up close, hardly look like anything coherent. But then you step back and it all makes sense.

The D’Orsay has two Van Gogh-self portraits. Those alone are worth the price of admission (8.5 euros; about $10).

But it has so much more. A broad avenue of sculpture just inside the entrance. A five-floor building filled with really good stuff. And on the fifth floor… oodles of Manet and Degas (ballerinas by the dozens) … and a wonderful room behind one of the old clocks of the train station, and through the clock you can see Montmarte/Sacre-Coeur, rising on its hill, across the river, as well as the Opera Garnier.

What cinches this as a great place to visit is the space to move around. Perhaps because it isn’t the Louvre (in the background of the photo below), and doesn’t have the “must see” cachet, the crowds seem manageable. You don’t find yourself banging elbows with strangers every time you stop to give Toulouse Lautrec a look. And the art is not fusty, and the space doesn’t feel musty (see: the Louvre), and the musee doesn’t have a sense of tourists rushing through to see the things they have been told they must see — Mona Lisa, Winged Victory of Samothrace, et al.

All I regret is that I didn’t see the Musee D’Orsay sooner — even after several people whose opinions I respect, including my friend David Bristow, had declared it to be their favorite museum in the city.

It took me more than a quarter of a century to “discover” the Musee D’Orsay. I will be back much sooner than that. Inshallah.