Petit Palais

The story

The Petit Palais was inaugurated for the 1900 Exposition Universelle as a showcase of Beaux-Arts design with Art Nouveau details. The building is half the attraction: a grand entrance, mosaics, elegant staircases, colourful painted ceilings and an inner courtyard garden with golden statues and a café, Le Café du Petit Palais. The collection runs from antiquity, including a first-century cameo-glass plaque of a satyr and the infant Dionysus, through to the early twentieth century. Highlights include Monet's winter sunset on the Seine at Lavacourt, Carpeaux's Ugolino and His Sons, a Saint-Porchaire candlestick and works by Rembrandt, Cézanne and Pissarro. Temporary exhibitions, such as shows on Eva Gonzalès and Brussels around 1900, add to the programme, and artists often sit sketching in quiet corners.