The Petit Palais was built by Charles Girault between 1897 and 1900 as one of three landmarks for the Exposition Universelle of 1900. It stands across Avenue Winston-Churchill from the Grand Palais, which faces it directly, and is approached by the Pont Alexandre III, which crosses the Seine to the Esplanade des Invalides. The three buildings formed a temporary monumental armature that was so confidently designed that it was quietly absorbed into permanent Paris.
The plan is a flattened trapezoid wrapped around a semi-circular interior courtyard, which is itself ringed by a peristyle of paired Ionic columns and arcaded gardens. This is a characteristic Beaux-Arts move that delivers two facades of equal status: a public face on the avenue and a private face within the garden. The principal facade is composed in classical academic fashion. A rusticated base supports an Ionic colonnade running the length of the building, framed at the centre by a great portal beneath a triumphal arch with a sculptural pediment. A low dome rises behind the entrance and quietly anchors the composition rather than dominating it. The underlying frame of the building is wrought iron, hidden behind the stone. This is characteristic of late Beaux-Arts practice, which used industrial structure to enable spans and lighting that pure masonry could not provide. Girault used a frankly hybrid decorative vocabulary, with polychrome mosaics, gilded grilles, painted ceilings, and coloured marble, so that the interior reads as continuous decoration set within a disciplined classical envelope.
Girault would later plan the avenue de Tervueren in Brussels for Leopold II, but the Petit Palais remains his most resolved object. It is a museum that argues, persuasively, that ornament can be intellectually serious.