Petit Palais - Musée des Beaux-Arts

I visited the Petit Palais or Musée des Beaux-Arts today.  Impressed to say the least...from the building itself to the collections.  Called the Petit Palais only because it rests across the street from the Grand Palais, it's far from small. Here are some shots of the building, day and evening...

 This is my ticket...mainly to remind me of the non-permanent gallery of Felix ZIEM (French tend to capitalize your nom (surname) and write your prenom (first name) normally.  On the note of the non-permanent gallery, the Petit Palais is free for the permanent gallery.  Nice!  You can see what they have on their website, but it's a large array (two floors) of works - from hundreds of years before Christ to the 1900s.  The traveling exhibit (in this case, Felix ZIEM) was a fraction of the Palais.

So what did ZIEM do/create?  Quite a bit, actually and this blog entry won't do his work justice.  I thought the most interesting pieces were his sketch [croquis (m) or esquisse (f)] books.  He made dozens of little paintings on wood which also seemed as sketches and the collection was impressive.
This was really cool.  I took a picture of the "petite" palace, and as you can see below looking at only one wing, it's far from petite.  And when I was on the lower level, there was a sketch of this ceiling.  How cool is that?  An oil painting of a sketch which was to be one of the ceilings.  You can see the two below...

 Some other works that really grabbed my attention included...

• Barrais' Les premières funérailles where Adam and Eve are carrying Able.  It was awesome and I don't think I've ever seen any other work depicting the aftermath of that first murder.
• Morot's Good Samaritan.  Wow!  Painted in 1880 - couldn't believe it.  I compare it to the cave paintings of Altamira where their concept of art was ahead of their time. I don't know of another 1800s painting that captures the human as well as this.  And, it's a large painting so it definitely gets your attention.
• Jean-Paul Aubé's Dante which was his most famous sculpture. I might be mistaken but I though this was the original model for the final bronze, but after some research, it might just be a copy.  Regardless, it is a great sculpture and well worth seeing, and the bronze lives in Place Marcelin Berthelot.

Barrais, First Funeral

Aubé, Dante

Morot, le bon Samaritain

Also, I stumbled across Jan Van Beers' Les Funérailles de Charles le Bon and an amazing collection of Lucas de Leyde engravings from the 1500s.  They were incredibly detailed and almost 500 years old. But, it's one of those rooms in a gallery you might never visit. People visit for the "hits" and get tired in large galleries, but I'm glad I stopped in.  Another interesting thing about these engravings was the correlation between many other, famous paintings.