The story
The Petit Palais in Geneva was the creation of one man, Oscar Ghez, a Tunisian-born industrialist who made his fortune in rubber and spent it on paintings. In 1968 he opened a museum in a Geneva mansion to show a collection built with an unusually free eye, reaching across late-19th and early-20th-century French art.
Ghez went past the famous names. Alongside a Manet or a Renoir he bought Neo-Impressionists, Nabis and School of Paris painters who were then out of fashion, and, well ahead of the market, a great many women artists, among them Suzanne Valadon, Marie Bracquemond and Tamara de Lempicka.
After Ghez died in 1998 the museum stopped opening its doors to the public, and the collection now travels in loan exhibitions rather than hanging in one place, which is how most people meet these several thousand pictures today.
