Canvasas of Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Edouard Vuillard take over Paris' city hall with a remarkable free entry exhibition "Paris at the Time of the Impressionists" (until July 23, 2011)

After a half-century of bloodshed and upheaval Paris deserved a new beginning, so when Napoleon III declared the Second Empire in 1852 he let loose his architectural bloodhound, Georges-Eugene Haussmann, onto the burgeoning city. The resulting Paris was a municipal paradise, replete with theatres, stations and streetlamps, and its cultural and economic promise made it irresistible to a continent of modern artists.

To commemorate these fertile Parisian decades and the myriad visions of the artists who witnessed them, the Musee d'Orsay has lent dozens of artworks to hang in the Hotel de Ville - an apt spot since, as the political centrepiece of the era, it was burnt down and rebuilt during the 1870s.

The one-room exhibition is divided into open sections each dealing with a different side to the city, beginning with a corridor of diagrams and architectural studies of the new city, and focusing closely on its impressive new theatres. These afforded the city a vibrant contrast to the dour delineations of Haussman, as illustrated by Henri Schmidt’s brass model of the florid "Theatre de la Porte St Martin."

Like this model, many of the artworks in the exhibition are not strictly paintings; there are maps, unfinished murals and a rolling projection of photographs in the central section, showing sooty images of factories and machines. This sense of industrial expanse governs many of the works, Monet’s famous "La Gare St Lazare," for instance, and "La Metro" by Vuillard, each with a separate view of the city’s new railways. For Monet, the steam engine is a vehicle of ethereal promise, for Vuillard, the underground station seems like a sinister demi-monde.

As the exhibition develops, the louche diversions of the more comfortable artists – the aesthetes and dandys of the 1850s – are contrasted with the medieval burdens of the working classes and the violent unrest that again descended on Paris in the 1870s. Toulouse-Lautrec’s study "Seule" is a subtle and sad critique of prostitution, showing simply an emaciated girl deflated on a bed, while Andre Devambez’s "La Charge" commands the eye with its dramatic, bird’s-eye view of a revolt being quashed by police.

Between 1848 and 1914, a modern Paris was at the center of artistic preoccupations. The Impressionists identified with this new dynamic urban life and its newly designed avenues, bridges and monoliths. Works by major impressionists and post-impressionists; Van Gogh, Gaugin, Luce and Jongkind to name a few, give a rich and kaleidoscopic insight into the emerging life of the city, seen here in pride of place, exquisitely curated and free of charge.