Jan 31, 2025: Exploring Paris’ galleries, historic buildings and the Petit Palais

What’s up everyone! I hope you’ve all been dying to hear the rest of my story, because that’s what I’m gonna talk about! Tuesday was another riveting day of exploring Paris. This time, me and some international students decided to go and look at the Galeries Lafayette (named after General Lafayette, a French general who fought in the American Revolution). This place, despite the fancy sounding name, is a mall. But, it’s a very fancy mall! It is chock full of designer clothes, luxury perfumes, and high-class pastries and restaurants. It even has a large painted glass dome In the middle! The symbols and engravings on the dome are really astonishing, something that my picture cannot do justice to. 

On top of the gallery, we were able to get an incredible view of Paris! There were few clouds that day, and the sun was setting in just the right way that it made the scene all the more gorgeous, especially with the Eiffel Tower in the distance. Right next to the gallery was the Paris Opera. This building was even more beautiful than the gallery, with its ornate wall carvings and lampposts. Unfortunately, the front of the building was taken up by a big advertisement for a new play (and by taken up, I mean they created an entirely new pseudo-front for the building) so I couldn’t get a nice frontal shot. Even worse, we were there too late to be able to get inside! Mark my words, however, I will be back to check out the inside.

The next day, it was off to the Petit Palais. The Petit Palais (literally means small palace), situated next to its bigger counterpart the Grand Palais (large palace) is an art museum. It houses a large collection of sculptures, paintings, and furniture taking inspiration from different time periods and concepts. They had sculptures inspired from greek myth, such as Orpheus lamenting his failure to save his wife from the underworld, to paintings depicting Jesus Christ in various biblical scenes, to canvases and statues representing people’s day to day lives, such as a portrait of the bustling marketplace of Les Halles to a sculpture of a woman carrying around bread. My favorite was a painting of Jesus Chirst on the cross. The artist managed to depict the anatomy of the figure so well that it even looked more realistic than real life! The way the artist depicted how the muscles fit on top of the bones, how the skin fit over the muscle, and how the muscles connected to each other really goes to show the mastery over human anatomy the artist had.

Unfortunately, I can’t describe any other artworks after this one since I have run out of space for this post! You’ll all have to wait until my next post to see what my last day has in store!