Petit Palais

Built for the 1900 World’s Fair, just at the Place de la Concorde you will see two structures covered by domes of iron and glass known as the Petit Palais and the Grand Palais.

Design

With its 240 metre-long façade (entered from Avenue Franklin Roosevelt), the Grand Palais is used for various exhibitions. Part of the building is the permanent site of the Palais de la Découverte where recent scientific discoveries, interactive exhibits, some very good temporary exhibitions and a planetarium are displayed.

The Collection

The collection begins with large nineteenth-century French academic pictures like Doré’s Valley of Tears, to rooms filled with fifteenth-century Flemish paintings, and Italian Renaissance works including examples by Botticelli, Mantegna and Cima da Conegliano. There are also objets d ‘art, maiolica ware, ivories, and statuary. Other rooms have paintings by some of the great Dutch masters of the seventeenth century. Beyond the stairways, the rooms contain a small collection of French nineteenth-century art: there are a number of Courbet, as well as works by Corot, the Impressionists, Cézanne, Gauguin, Vuillard, and Toulouse-Lautrec. A panelled room at the end of the tour contains eighteenth-century paintings, tapestries, china and a sedan chair.