# Petit Palais audio guide, five stops, free.

Five works from the palace built for the 1900 World's Fair, playing straight from this page. Everything else in the City of Paris fine-arts museum, from ancient bronzes to an Art Nouveau dining room, Chiaro explains from a photo.

Made by Chiaro. Not affiliated with Petit Palais, musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris. Page: https://chiaro.ai/museums/petit-palais/

Charles Girault built this palace for the 1900 World's Fair, and this Petit Palais audio guide uses both of its floors. The walk opens in Salle 05 with two Courbets, The Sleepers and Young Ladies Beside the Seine, moves on to Doré's enormous Vale of Tears in Salle 06, comes back to the hall for Mercié's Gloria Victis, and ends one floor down with Ingres's tiny Death of Leonardo in Salle 29. One thing to know about floor names here: the museum calls the floor you enter on the Rez-de-Jardin and the one below it the Rez-de-Chaussée, while its printed plan calls them the upper and lower levels. Listening to all five takes about nine minutes, and the whole walk, staircase included, fits comfortably into forty-five.

The dates, sizes and rooms come from Paris Musées Collections, the database in which the City of Paris museums record every work and the room it hangs in, and the stories behind the works are checked against the museum's own notes and published references. All five rooms were reconfirmed on 25 September 2026. The Petit Palais lends its paintings and rehangs rooms around its exhibitions, so if the label beside a work disagrees with us, trust the label and tell us what changed.

## The stops

### 1. The Sleepers (Le Sommeil)

Gustave Courbet · 1866 · Oil on canvas, 135 × 200 cm · Rez-de-Jardin (upper level), Salle 05

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/petit-palais/en/le-sommeil.mp3?v=1148803 (144 s)

Look for:
- The comb, the broken necklace and the loose pearls lost in the sheets. They are the only clue to what happened before sleep.
- The two heads of hair, red and dark, laid against each other. Courbet built the whole picture on that contrast of hair and skin.
- The signature and date in the lower right corner, G. Courbet 66, and the carafes and cup on the little table at the lower left.

Two women asleep on an unmade bed, wrapped around each other so closely that it takes a moment to work out whose arm is whose. The canvas is two metres wide and the bodies are painted life size, which is part of why a room full of people tends to go quiet in front of it.

Gustave Courbet painted this in 1866, and it was never meant for the public. It was a private commission from Khalil-Bey, an Ottoman diplomat who had been living in Paris since 1860 and who bought the art of his own day with real appetite: Delacroix, Chassériau, Théodore Rousseau. In 1865 he had bought Ingres's Turkish Bath, which now hangs in the Louvre. Because this picture went straight from the studio into his collection, it never had to get past the jury and the censors of the Salon. The same client ordered one more canvas from Courbet, more private still: L'Origine du monde, now at the Musée d'Orsay.

Look at how the contrast is built. One woman is a redhead with pale skin, the other a brunette with a darker complexion, and the whole composition is the play between them, hair against hair, skin against skin. The museum's database names one of the models as Joanna Hiffernan, known as Jo the Irishwoman. At the time she was the companion of the painter James McNeill Whistler. That relationship ended soon afterwards, and Whistler's opinion of Courbet soured with it.

Now look down into the sheets. A hair comb, a broken necklace, loose pearls scattered across the linen. On the little table in the foreground stand carafes and a cup, and at the back, against the dark curtain, a porcelain vase of flowers. In the lower right corner, the signature and the year: G. Courbet 66.

The picture has worn several names. Before it settled as Le Sommeil it was called Les Dormeuses, and less politely Paresse et luxure, Idleness and Lust. When a picture dealer showed it in 1872, it earned a police report. The museum's own notice sets it beside Manet's Olympia, the scandal of the Salon of 1865, a canvas of very nearly the same format. And Courbet was not only picking a fight with his own century. He had trained by copying the old masters, and here he takes on the two great painters of the female nude, Titian and Rembrandt, on their own ground.

The Petit Palais bought it in 1953. In the spring of 2026 it spent four months in Vienna, on loan to a Courbet exhibition at the Leopold Museum that closed on the twenty-first of June 2026. It is back on this wall now, in a room the museum gives over to Courbet, with his self-portrait with a black dog and his portrait of Proudhon and his children nearby.

### 2. Young Ladies Beside the Seine (Summer)

Gustave Courbet · 1857 · Oil on canvas, 174 × 206 cm · Rez-de-Jardin (upper level), Salle 05

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/petit-palais/en/young-ladies-beside-the-seine.mp3?v=907014 (113 s)

Look for:
- The woman in front, flat on her stomach in a white patterned dress with her eyes half closed. Nothing about the pose is arranged for the viewer.
- The boat moored against the bank on the left, and the far shore of the Seine glimpsed in the upper left corner through the trees.
- The signature at the lower left, G. Courbet, on a picture that looks painted outdoors and was in fact finished in the studio.

Stay in the same room and turn to the other large Courbet, painted nine years earlier. Two young women have walked down to the river on a hot day and simply stopped. The one in front has given up entirely. She lies on her stomach in a white patterned dress, her head on a cloth, her eyes half closed. The one behind her, in a hat, props her head on her hand, holds a bunch of flowers, and looks away towards the water.

The full title is Young Ladies Beside the Seine, Summer, and it was shown at the Salon of 1857, opening on the fifteenth of June. The trouble was the subject and the size together. This is a scene of ordinary life at nearly two metres by two, an unusually large format for that kind of picture, and it broke the rules of the day. The critics made a scandal of it. The museum's database adds a detail that tells you how far it went: Champfleury, the great champion of realism and one of Courbet's own defenders, denounced the troubling seduction of these Parisian women abandoned to the torpor of summer. They are city women, not country girls, and some viewers took them for prostitutes.

Here is the surprise. It looks like the most open-air painting in the building, and it was not painted outdoors. Courbet began it at Ornans, his home town, in 1856, and finished it in the studio as a work of imagination. Look at the upper left anyway, where the far bank of the Seine shows through the trees, and at the boat tied up against the bank. By its subject and its light, laid on in broad strokes, it points ahead to the riverbanks the Impressionists would paint a generation later, and it came six years before Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe, now at the Orsay.

Its road to this room ran through friends and family. Courbet's friend and patron Étienne Baudry bought it, and from him it passed to the painter's sister, Juliette, and the museum records her gift on the fourth of August 1906. A smaller version, ninety-six and a half centimetres by a hundred and thirty, perhaps by Courbet and perhaps by a follower, hangs in the National Gallery in London. The signature on this one is down in the lower left corner: G. Courbet.

### 3. The Vale of Tears

Gustave Doré · 1883 · Oil on canvas, 413.5 × 627 cm · Rez-de-Jardin (upper level), Salle 06

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/petit-palais/en/vallee-de-larmes.mp3?v=783925 (98 s)

Look for:
- Christ, small and far back at the upper left, carrying the cross inside a ring of light. A religious picture that pushes its main figure into the distance is a rare thing.
- The crowd in the foreground: kings and beggars, children and old people, in clothes that recall the Middle East.
- Step back to the far side of the room for the whole canvas. It is more than four metres high and six wide.

In Salle 06, one wall belongs to a single canvas more than four metres high and six wide. Your eye goes first to the light, far back in the upper left: a small pale figure carrying a cross, inside a ring of brightness. Then it comes forward, down into the crowd, and stays there, because the crowd is the painting.

Gustave Doré painted The Vale of Tears in 1883. He began it around the time his mother died and finished it very shortly before his own death. The subject is a line from the Gospel of Saint Matthew: Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Look at who has answered. Kings and beggars, children and old people, men and women, all in clothes that recall the Middle East. Christ is tiny and distant, which is unusual for a religious picture. Doré gave the foreground to the people who are suffering.

He had made his name with an illustrated Bible, and it sold so well that in 1867 he was commissioned to paint about twenty huge biblical canvases. This one closes the cycle. The series went to London, to a Doré Gallery that ran from 1869 to 1892 and drew about two and a half million visitors. French critics had savaged him, the museum says, understanding neither his visionary realism nor his gift for staging a scene. He was born and died in the same years as Manet, and he found his public abroad.

Then the story turns strange. In 1892 most of the canvases were shipped to the United States for a touring show that ran until 1898. After that they were forgotten. In 1947 they turned up in a warehouse in Manhattan, were sold at auction and scattered. The Petit Palais bought this one in October 1984. It was conserved and remounted in 2005, and it has been on show again since 2006: six metres of grieving people, lit by one small figure at the back.

### 4. Gloria Victis

Antonin Mercié · 1875 · Bronze, 311 cm high, cast by Thiébaut et fils · Rez-de-Jardin (upper level), Hall

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/petit-palais/en/gloria-victis.mp3?v=821959 (103 s)

Look for:
- The one point of contact. The winged Glory stands on the tip of a single foot, with about eight hundred kilos of bronze above it.
- The soldier's bandaged forehead and the broken sabre still in his fist: a defeat, not a victory.
- The base: GLORIA VICTIS and A. MERCIE, and the founder's stamp, Fdu par THIEBAUT & FILS.

Walk back into the hall and look up. The bronze is more than three metres tall and weighs about eight hundred kilos, and it all balances on almost nothing. A winged Glory in armour is taking off with a young soldier in her arms, and her whole weight rests on the tip of one foot.

Antonin Mercié made the model in 1872, a year after France lost its war against Prussia. The soldier is naked and dying. His forehead is bound with a bandage and his fist still grips a broken sabre. Glory is carrying him up towards fame and immortality, and the title is a deliberate provocation. Gloria victis means glory to the vanquished. It turns round the old cry vae victis, woe to the vanquished, which the Gaulish chief Brennus is said to have thrown at the Romans he had beaten in 390 BC. Mercié meant it for the French soldiers who had fallen, and above all for his friend the painter Henri Regnault, killed in 1871.

He was still a young resident of the Académie de France in Rome, and the plaster model was the last work he sent back to Paris from there. It went on show at the Salon of 1874, and the City of Paris bought it straight away to have this bronze made, which is how it came to stand in the city's own museum of fine arts. Walk round to the base. The inscription reads GLORIA VICTIS and A. MERCIE, and there is the stamp of the foundry that cast it, Thiébaut and sons.

France took it to heart. The Barbedienne firm went on to sell reductions of it in large numbers, and other casts stand in Bordeaux and in Copenhagen. Not everyone was moved. The sculptor Jean Baffier was disgusted that anyone would put a defeat on a pedestal, and wrote that France had been beaten like wheat in a barn and then shouted glory to the losers. Standing underneath it, you can see both points of view at once. The sabre is snapped, the soldier hangs limp, and the only thing in the whole group still rising is the angel.

### 5. Francis I Receives the Last Breath of Leonardo da Vinci

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · 1818 · Oil on canvas, 40 × 50.5 cm · Rez-de-Chaussée (lower level), Salle 29

Audio: https://audio.chiaro.ai/museums/petit-palais/en/death-of-leonardo.mp3?v=864591 (108 s)

Look for:
- The size. Forty centimetres by fifty and a half: a full history painting on the scale of an open book, so stand close.
- The chair beside the bed, knocked at an angle. The king has just jumped up from it.
- The small medallion on Leonardo's chest, the Order of Saint Michael, and the signature at the lower left, Ingres Pint. 1818.

The last stop is one floor down, in Salle 29, and it comes with a change of scale. After Doré's six metres, this is forty centimetres by fifty and a half, a history painting about the size of an open book. Get close.

A king bends over a bed and cradles the head of a dying old man. The old man is Leonardo da Vinci. The king is Francis the First of France, who had invited Leonardo to his court, and the place is Amboise, in 1519. Ingres took the scene from Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists, which says that to show him favour and to soothe his pain, the king held his head. It is a lovely sentence and probably not true. The museum's own record calls the episode most likely fictional.

Look at how Ingres put it together. He borrowed faces from famous paintings in the Louvre, and the king's profile comes from the portrait Titian painted of Francis in 1539. The dying Leonardo, on the other hand, is Ingres's own invention. Now find the chair beside the bed, knocked at an angle: the king has just leapt out of it. And on Leonardo's chest, a small medallion, the king's Order of Saint Michael.

Ingres painted this in Rome in 1818, for the comte de Blacas, the ambassador of King Louis the Eighteenth. His years as a resident of the Académie de France were over, but he stayed on in Italy until 1824. The date matters. France had just brought back its kings, and a picture of a French monarch tenderly honouring the greatest artist of the Renaissance carried a message about throne, altar and royal generosity to the arts. Ingres made the same point in another picture, Henri the Fourth playing with his children as the Spanish ambassador is shown in, which the museum lists as a related work and which hangs in this same room.

The Petit Palais bought this one in 1968. Ingres came back to the subject more than thirty years later, and that second version, from around 1851, belongs to the Smith College Museum of Art. This one he signed and dated in the lower left corner: Ingres Pint. 1818.

## Before you go

Avenue Winston-Churchill, 75008 Paris, opposite the Grand Palais, between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine. Individual visitors go in by the main entrance; groups and visitors with reduced mobility use the door at the foot of the main staircase, bottom right, on the Rez-de-Chaussée level.

Champs-Élysées – Clemenceau, on métro lines 1 and 13, is the closest station, and Franklin D. Roosevelt on line 9 is an alternative. RER C stops at Invalides. Buses 28, 42, 72, 73, 80, 83 and 93 serve the area, and Vélib' has a dock named after the museum, station 8001.

- The collections are free and there is nothing to reserve. Only the temporary exhibitions charge admission, and for those the museum strongly advises booking ahead.
- Mondays are the day off, together with 1 January, 1 May, 14 July, 11 November and 25 December. Tuesday to Sunday it runs from 10am to 6pm, though the last entry to the collections is at 5.15pm.
- The Friday and Saturday late openings, until 8pm, are for the exhibitions, the café and the garden only. The collection rooms, and with them all five stops, are shut in the evening.
- The garden at the heart of the building is free to enter, and Café 1902 sits inside it, serving until 5.45pm, with last orders at 5.15pm.
- Leave suitcases and large backpacks behind, cabin bags included; lockers take ordinary bags. Taking photos for your own use is allowed.

Official tickets: https://www.petitpalais.paris.fr/visiter/preparer-votre-visite

The museum's own guide comes as an app rather than a device: free for iPhone and Android, bilingual, with six routes that include 12 masterpieces, 30 essentials, a French Sign Language tour, an audio-described tour and a walk around the outside of the building. Both cost nothing, so use them together: the museum's app for its routes and the walk round the outside, this page for five stories inside, and the Chiaro app for anything neither reaches.

Official site: https://www.petitpalais.paris.fr

## Questions

**Is there a free Petit Palais audio guide?**

Yes, and the museum itself is free too. This page plays five narrated stops in any phone browser, with every script printed below its player, and the museum publishes its own free visit app with six routes. For a work neither of them covers, photograph it and the Chiaro app tells its story.

**How much is the official Petit Palais audio guide?**

Nothing. The museum's guide is its own visit app for iOS and Android, bilingual, with routes ranging from 12 masterpieces to 30 essentials, plus tours in French Sign Language and with audio description.

**Where is Courbet's The Sleepers in the Petit Palais?**

In Salle 05 on the Rez-de-Jardin, the floor you enter on, which the museum's plan labels the upper level. It shares the Courbet room with Young Ladies Beside the Seine and his self-portrait with a black dog. It was lent to Vienna until 21 June 2026 and is back on display.

**Is the Petit Palais closed on Mondays?**

Yes, Monday is its weekly closing day. Five public holidays are closed as well: 1 January, 1 May, 14 July, 11 November and 25 December. Tuesday through Sunday the palace keeps 10am to 6pm hours, with the collection rooms taking their last visitors at a quarter past five.

**Is the Petit Palais free?**

Walking into the permanent collection is free for anyone, with no ticket to reserve, and that is where all five of our stops hang. Temporary exhibitions carry their own paid tickets. The garden and Café 1902 cost nothing to walk into.

**Is the Petit Palais open late?**

Only for exhibitions. On Fridays and Saturdays the building stays open until 8pm for the temporary shows, the café and the garden, but the permanent collection is closed in the evening, so do these five stops in the daytime.

## Continue in the app

Point Chiaro at anything in the Petit Palais.

Our tour ends at the Ingres, but the palace carries on for two full floors. Photograph Carpeaux's Ugolino in its rotunda, the Rembrandt self-portrait downstairs, or Cormon's painted vault over the Galerie Nord, and the app names what you are looking at, explains how it got here, and answers your next question out loud where you stand.

Download Chiaro: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6745618830?pt=127817940&ct=petit-palais-md&mt=8