The Petit Palais and its garden courtyard
Charles Girault (1851 to 1932) · 1897 to 1900
Before you look at a single painting, take in the building itself. The Petit Palais was designed by Charles Girault for the Universal Exhibition of 1900, at the same time as the Grand Palais opposite and the Pont Alexandre III just down the avenue. It was always meant to become a museum once the fair closed, and the City of Paris opened it as its fine arts museum in December 1902. The plan is a trapezoid wrapped around a semicircular garden, so that almost every gallery has daylight on one side and a view of greenery on the other.
The garden courtyard is the building's best idea. A curved colonnade of paired columns encloses a lawn with three small pools, palms and banana trees, and the ground is covered in mosaics of gold and blue by the ceramicist Alexandre Bigot's contemporaries. The galleries that surround it have painted ceilings and domes by Albert Besnard, Maurice Denis, Paul Baudouin and others, added over the two decades after the opening. Look up in the entrance vestibule at the dome showing Paris crowned by the Muses, and notice the wrought iron of the staircases, which is some of the finest ironwork of the period.
The museum was thoroughly restored between 2001 and 2005, when the garden was replanted and the galleries returned to their original colours. Since then the permanent collection has been free to enter, which is unusual for a museum of this quality in Paris. One memorable detail: from the garden colonnade you can see the gilded entrance gate on the far side and, through it, the Grand Palais, a reminder that the two buildings were conceived together as a single festive ensemble for the year 1900.
Did You Know? The Petit Palais was built in about three years to be ready for the Universal Exhibition of 1900, and the garden courtyard was designed to be visible from the galleries on all sides.
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