Petit Palais

The Petit Palais houses the City of Paris's Museum of Fine Arts, and remarkably, it's free to enter. Built for the 1900 World's Fair as a companion to the Grand Palais across the avenue, the building itself is a Belle Époque jewel, arranged around a beautiful semicircular garden courtyard with a café. Inside, the collection spans antiquity to 1900: paintings by Courbet, Monet, and Rembrandt, decorative arts, sculpture, and a sumptuous interior of frescoed ceilings, mosaics, and a sweeping ironwork staircase.

It's often overlooked beside the Louvre and Orsay, which is exactly its appeal, a high-quality, uncrowded, free museum in a gorgeous setting just off the Champs-Élysées. The garden café is one of the loveliest quiet spots in central Paris. An easy, rewarding stop for art lovers and budget travellers alike.

Don't miss

• Free entry to a fine-arts collection
• Works by Courbet, Monet, and Rembrandt
• The Belle Époque building and frescoed interiors
• The semicircular garden courtyard and café
• Its location off the Champs-Élysées, opposite the Grand Palais

Good for

How travelers rate it

Know before you go

• The permanent collection is free, a rare bargain among Paris's major museums.
• Don't miss the garden courtyard café, a peaceful central-Paris hideaway.
• Closed Mondays; it's blissfully uncrowded compared with the Louvre/Orsay.
• Pair it with the Grand Palais opposite and a Champs-Élysées walk.

A bit of history

Built for the Exposition Universelle of 1900 (like the Grand Palais opposite), the Petit Palais became the City of Paris's fine-arts museum in 1902. Its permanent collection has been free to the public, set within the ornate Beaux-Arts building and its garden.