Petit Palais

The Petit Palais sits on the Avenue Winston Churchill in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, directly opposite the Grand Palais. Built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition, it was designed by architect Charles Girault in a Beaux-Arts style that combines a grand colonnaded facade with an interior garden courtyard of remarkable elegance. The City of Paris took ownership of the building following the exhibition, and it has served as the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris ever since, housing a permanent collection that spans ancient Greek and Roman antiquities, medieval and Renaissance decorative arts, and French paintings from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries.

The museum's current exhibition, Artists' Faces, draws on portraiture and self-portraiture to explore how painters, sculptors, and draughtsmen have represented themselves and their peers across the centuries. The Petit Palais remains free to enter for its permanent galleries, making it one of the more accessible major museums in the French capital, while temporary exhibitions such as this one bring focused scholarship to a broad public audience.