Petit Palais

From Paris Hotels Reviews

The Petit Palais (Tues-Sun 10am-6pm; free; www.petitpalais.paris.fr; M° Champs-Elysées-Clemenceau), facing the Grand Palais on avenue Winston Churchill, holds the Musee des Beaux Arts de la Ville de Paris. It's hardly “petit”, but it's certainly palatial, with its highly decorated Neoclassical exterior, interior garden with Tuscan colonnade, beautiful spiral wrought-iron staircases and a grand gallery on the lines of Versailles' Hall of Mirrors. A major renovation, completed in 2005, has returned the building to its original slendour, allowing more natural light to enter and illuminate the restored stained-glass windows and ceiling frescoes. The revamp has freed up more space for the museum's extensive holdings of paintings, sculpture and decorative artworks, displayed on two floors and raging from the ancient Greek and Roman period up to the early twentieth century. At first sight it looks like it's mopped up the leftovers after the city's other galleries have taken their pick, but there are some real gems here, such as Monet's Soleil couchant sur la Seine a Lavacourt, Courbet's provocative Demoiselles des bord de la Seine and Pissarro's delicate Le Pont royal et le Pavillon de Flore, painted a few months before he died. Decorative arts feature strongly, especially eighteenth-century furniture and porcelain, including a whimsical clock decorated with an orchestra of monkeys in Meissen china. There's also fantasy jewellery of the Art Nouveau period, an elegant dining room in pear wood designed by Hector Guimard (who designed the original Paris métro stations), Russian icons, and a fine collection of seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting. Changing exhibitions, such as a recent one on Sargent and Sorolla, allow the museum to display works from its vast reserves. If your own reserves are running low you could head for the smart new café, which opens out onto the restored interior garden.