The Petit Palais is presenting for the first time a selection of close to 150 pastels from its own collection. The exhibition offers an exhaustive overview of the main artistic currents of the second half of the 19th-century, from Impressionism to Symbolism.

From the tradition of flower painting to the aesthetic breaks of modernity, the exhibition highlights the rich artistic, aesthetic and friendly exchanges between Dutch and French painters, from the reign of Napoleon to the early twentieth century.

The inaugural temporary exhibition aims to put Casa Vicens in an international context with a view of single-family homes designed by Gaudí?s most important contemporaries: the timeline of these figures begins with Viollet-le-Duc and William Morris, who were key in Gaudí?s training, and then moves to great American architects from the first generation of the Modern Architecture movement (Richardson, Sullivan and Wright), European architects of the same generation (Berlage, Wagner and others), and finishes up with various expressions of Art Nouveau (Horta, Guimard, Mackintosh and Olbirch).

This exhibition will present masterpieces of the Arts & Crafts movement, which arose in Great Britain around 1880. It was a movement born from ideals, the concern for the effects of industrialisation in design, know-how and everyday life. It advocated a reactivation of traditional arts and crafts, a return to a simpler way of life and an improvement in the design of ordinary domestic objects. Its maximum ideologist was the artist and writer William Morris (1834-1896).