Petit Palais: The City's Golden Gift
Why is it significant?
In front of you, a monumental gate of gilded wrought iron, framed by a dome and a great arch of stone. Behind the gate, a staircase, a gallery of columns, ceilings swirling with painted clouds. Its big neighbour across the road was built to impress the crowds. This one was built to seduce them.
Key Facts
| Place | Petit Palais: The City's Golden Gift |
|---|---|
| Address | Avenue Winston Churchill, 75008 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.86600, 2.31530 |
| Part of Walk | Triumph and Guillotine: The Champs-Élysées from the Arc de Triomphe to Concorde, Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you, a monumental gate of gilded wrought iron, framed by a dome and a great arch of stone. Behind the gate, a staircase, a gallery of columns, ceilings swirling with painted clouds. Its big neighbour across the road was built to impress the crowds. This one was built to seduce them.
The Petit Palais was designed by Charles Girault for the 1900 World's Fair, where it housed a great exhibition of French art. The city of Paris kept it afterwards and turned it into its own Museum of Fine Arts. Girault was so successful that the Belgian king, Leopold the Second, later asked him to build monuments in Brussels. Look at the floors as you walk in: mosaics in every colour, laid by Italian craftsmen, curling under your feet like a carpet of stone.
Inside, the collections run from Greek vases to the paintings of the Belle Époque, with a whole roomful of works by Gustave Courbet, the painter who scandalised the nineteenth century by painting ordinary people as large as kings. His sleepy, sprawling young women on the banks of the Seine shocked the critics of 1857, and they are here.
But the real secret is in the middle of the building. Follow the galleries and you reach a semicircular garden courtyard, ringed by a colonnade with mosaic floors, with palm trees, a pool and a little café. On a summer afternoon it feels like a villa on the Riviera, a few steps from one of the busiest roundabouts in the city.
And the city has always kept its permanent collections free to enter, so this is one of the great bargains of Paris: a palace, a garden and Courbet, for nothing. Look up as you leave at the sculpted pediment over the entrance, where Paris is shown protecting the arts, an idea the building takes literally. Now walk down towards the river, to the most extravagant bridge in the city.