Galerie Georges Petit

Based in Paris, Galerie Georges Petit was the leading gallery for French Impressionism and later an important venue for retrospectives of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, among other artists. Following the death of Georges Petit (1856–1920), the gallery was acquired by rival dealers Etienne Bignou and brothers Gaston and Josse Bernheim-Jeune.

Petit founded the gallery in 1846, then known as Galerie François Petit, at 7 rue St Georges. After François’s death, his son Georges inherited the gallery in 1877 and assumed responsibility for its operations, building it into a powerful firm with sizeable influence on the French market by promoting the work of innovative living artists. Four years later, Galerie Georges Petit moved to 12 rue Godot de Mauroy and then, in 1890, to 8 rue de Sèze in the heart of Paris.

Georges Petit maintained his father’s interest in the work of contemporary artists, particularly the Impressionists. Beginning in 1882, the gallery ran a series of Expositions internationales de peinture, an alternative to the official Salon, that attracted artists such as Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Auguste Renoir. It also presented a number of high-profile exhibitions of prominent nineteenth-century French painters such as Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1884) and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (1912). Galerie Georges Petit established itself as a major competitor of Galerie Paul Durand-Ruel, and poached Alfred Sisley from its roster. In addition to mounting a large-scale joint retrospective of Monet and Auguste Rodin in 1889, which established Rodin’s position as France’s preeminent sculptor, the gallery became an important site for auction sales—artist Edgar Degas’s estate in 1918–19 among them—rivaling the Hôtel Drouot auction house.

Following Georges’s death in 1920, Bignou and the brothers Bernheim-Jeune took over the gallery, running it almost exclusively as an auction house for is first decade before transforming it into a hub for what they termed “independent” painting. Their first exhibition in June 1930 was an ambitious survey of one hundred years of French art, including work by three of the four “gallery” Cubist artists: Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Pablo Picasso. In the first years of that decade, the gallery presented important exhibitions of living artists, including recent paintings by Joaquín Torres-García (1931) and a major retrospective of Henri Matisse (June 16–July 25, 1931) that traveled to the Kunsthalle Basel and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In June 1932 it held Picasso’s first retrospective, with more than two hundred paintings, sculptures, and books, which later traveled to the Kunsthaus Zürich. Among the works exhibited were five canvases now in the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection: The Oil Mill (1909), Nude in an Armchair (1909), Carafe and Candlestick (1909), The Scallop Shell: “Notre Avenir est dans l’Air” (1912), and Woman in a Chemise in an Armchair (1913–14).

The gallery was in business for just a few more years, until 1933, when it closed, and its assets were sold.