The Louvre in 3 hours

TL;DR. Three hours at the Louvre is one wing, well. Buy a timed-entry ticket on louvre.fr for the 09:00 slot (€22 EEA / €32 outside the EEA, since the 14 January 2026 reform), enter via the Carrousel underground (not the Pyramid), and stay in the Denon wing. Route in order: Winged Victory of Samothrace → optional Apollo Gallery detour → Mona Lisa in Salle 711 (the Wedding at Cana opposite is the work most listicles miss) → Grande Galerie for Virgin of the Rocks and La Belle Ferronnière → Salles 702 and 700 for Coronation of Napoleon, Liberty Leading the People, Death of Sardanapalus → cross to Sully for Venus de Milo and the Great Sphinx of Tanis → optional Richelieu add-ons (Code of Hammurabi, Vermeer’s Lacemaker) if pace is loose. The skip-the-line marketplace is mostly upcharge — louvre.fr direct is the actual fast lane. Wednesday and Friday late nights (open until 21:00) are the single best window of the week.

• Address. Musée du Louvre, 99 Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France.
• Opening hours. Mon, Thu, Sat, Sun 09:00–18:00 (last entry 17:00). Wed and Fri 09:00–21:00 (last entry 20:00). Closed Tuesdays. Closed Jan 1, May 1, Dec 25. (louvre.fr/en/visit, working figures verified 2026-05-08; re-verify on publish day.)
• Standard ticket. €22 for EEA nationals or residents, €32 for non-EU visitors — the new two-tier structure took effect 14 January 2026 under the Louvre Nouvelle Renaissance funding plan. Buy timed-entry online via louvre.fr. Free for under-18s, EU residents under 26, disabled visitors plus companion. First Friday of each month after 18:00 is free for all (excluding July and August).
• Time needed. 3 hours minimum for the curated route below. 5+ hours to add Sully and Richelieu in any depth. A “complete” Louvre is a fiction — the museum holds roughly 35,000 works across three wings.
• Best entrance. Carrousel du Louvre underground (Métro line 1/7, Palais Royal–Musée du Louvre).
• Audio guide. Free Louvre app on iOS/Android, route-aware, multilingual. On-site rental ~€6 if you’d rather not use your phone.
• Photography. Permitted in permanent collections — no flash, no tripod, no selfie stick.
• Wi-Fi + accessibility. Free Wi-Fi throughout. Step-free across all three wings; reserved access lane at every entrance; free wheelchair loan.
• Bag rules. Lockers free for cabin-size or smaller. Suitcases and backpacks larger than 55×35×20 cm refused at security.

Three hours is 180 minutes; subtract 15 for security and the cloakroom and 20 for walking between halls and you have 145 minutes of looking time. Enough — generously — for twelve works at twelve minutes each. Nowhere near enough for “the Louvre.”

The honest answer is: one wing, well. The Louvre is structured as three wings — Denon (south, along the Seine), Sully (east, around the Cour Carrée), and Richelieu (north, along Rue de Rivoli) — plus the under-pyramid hall that connects them. Crossing wings costs 10–15 minutes of walking each time. Most listicles list works across all three without saying so, which is the single biggest reason first-time visitors burn 90 minutes lost.

Denon is the right default. The Mona Lisa, Winged Victory, Liberty Leading the People, Coronation of Napoleon, Wedding at Cana, La Belle Ferronnière, Virgin of the Rocks, Apollo Gallery, and Death of Sardanapalus are all Denon. Venus de Milo and the Great Sphinx of Tanis are a short cross into Sully. That is eleven of twelve essentials, less than 200 metres of walking. Richelieu — the Vermeers, the Mesopotamian wing, the Rembrandts, the French primitives — is its own visit, on a return trip.

If the Louvre is your only Paris museum, the natural complement is the Musée d’Orsay for 19th-century painting; our Paris art guide sequences a full 3-day route. For now, treat the next three hours as a single artwork.

Enter at the Carrousel underground entrance at 99 Rue de Rivoli — the photogenic glass Pyramid queue is routinely 20–30 minutes longer at peak. From the under-pyramid hall, take the Denon escalator to the first floor.

0:00–0:05. The Daru staircase lifts you to Winged Victory of Samothrace — Hellenistic Nike, headless, mid-flight, the stairwell built around her. Five minutes; she rewards approach more than examination.

0:05–0:15. Optional detour: turn left at the top of the staircase into the Apollo Gallery (Galerie d’Apollon). Painted ceilings and sculpted decoration by Le Brun and later artists. The gallery reopened on 22 July 2026, with its precious-object collection removed; visit for the room itself, not a display of crown jewels. Ten minutes. One of the few interiors in the museum where you feel inside the Louvre Palace rather than inside a museum.

0:15–0:35. South through the Denon corridors to Salle 711 (Salle des États) — the Mona Lisa room. The painting sits in a freestanding bullet-resistant case; queue management is a forward-only line. 15–20 minutes including queue. Critical: while everyone faces Mona Lisa, the Wedding at Cana by Veronese is on the opposite wall — 6.77×9.94 m, the largest painting in the Louvre, routinely missed because visitors arrive turned the wrong way. Look at it. (louvre.fr collection notice for the Wedding at Cana.)

0:35–0:55. Exit Salle 711 into the Grande Galerie — the 460-metre Italian-painting corridor. Virgin of the Rocks and La Belle Ferronnière (both Leonardo) hang here, along with Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin. Walking against the flow gets you out of the Mona Lisa exit crowd. Twenty minutes.

0:55–1:20. Continue through the large French-painting rooms: David’s Coronation of Napoleon is in Salle 702 (Daru); Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People and Death of Sardanapalus are in Salle 700 (Mollien), along with Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. 25 minutes. Closer to standing inside a 19th-century academic salon than to viewing easel paintings.

1:20–1:35. Cross down to ground floor and into Sully. Venus de Milo stands in Salle 346 at the end of a short Greek-classical corridor. Ten minutes.

1:35–1:50. Continue into Salle 338 for the Great Sphinx of Tanis — granite, 26 tonnes, in a quiet crypt-like room that is almost always less crowded than the painting halls upstairs. Photograph from a low angle.

1:50–3:00. Two choices. Conservative: walk the Egyptian sequence on Sully ground floor for 30 more minutes, exit, eat. Ambitious: cross to Richelieu for the Code of Hammurabi in Salle 227 — basalt stele, 1750 BCE, foundational legal text of Western antiquity — and ride up to Salle 837 for Vermeer’s Lacemaker. Both Richelieu stops cost about 30 minutes of walking. Only do it if you started at 09:00 sharp and your three-hour clock is still loose at minute 110.

Pre-book a louvre.fr-equivalent timed-entry through Tiqets if your date is sold out — same slot mechanic, useful only when louvre.fr’s allocation is gone.

The thirteenth work — the swap-in for travelers who would rather see Vermeer than Mesopotamia — is The Lacemaker in Salle 837, Richelieu second floor. 24×21 cm and a 90-second viewing that pays off the Richelieu trip. The Salle numbers above are the post-2014 reorganisation numbers; pre-2014 listicles use a different scheme and are unreliable.

Every major Louvre listicle is built around a 10-or-12-item canon. A 3-hour route needs a rejection list of roughly the same size. The five most common mis-allocations:

The Raft of the Medusa. Géricault, monumental, in Salle 700 — included in our route as a side-glance because it shares Salle 700 with Liberty Leading the People, close to Coronation of Napoleon in Salle 702. Not a stand-alone destination on a 3-hour visit.

Salle des Cariatides. Renaissance French sculpture, Sully ground floor. Historically important, off the natural Denon route. Skip on three hours, return on a five-hour visit.

The Egyptian sequence beyond the Sphinx. Sully ground and second floors, twelve rooms that need 90 minutes to walk honestly. The Sphinx is the punctuation mark; exit there.

Decorative arts in Richelieu. The Napoleon III apartments are the most spectacular interior in the museum and a 45-minute commitment off-route. Wonderful. Not for today.

The Islamic Art galleries under the Cour Visconti glass roof in Denon ground floor. A museum within the museum, world-class Iznik tiles, deserves its own visit. Skip on a first 3-hour pass.

The principle is the same in every case: the marginal next work is worth less than the time it costs to get to it. A serious return visit reverses the list and visits only the skip pile. That is the second-day Louvre.

Book a private 3-hour Louvre guide for a return visit if you want curatorial sequencing through the parts a 3-hour first visit has to skip.