An art gallery is usually a place, public or private, specifically designed to display and exhibit works of art to the public, in the context of temporary or permanent exhibitions. A public art gallery can be integrated into an institutional structure such as a museum, or be an autonomous exhibition space. A private art gallery, especially one intended for sale, is also a place for exhibitions and meetings, a “showcase” for art dealers.

The works on display are usually in the plastic arts, they are hung: paintings , drawings, photographs or placed on the ground: sculptures . But you can also find works of all kinds, such as antique or modern furniture .

The recent development of the Internet has made possible the creation of virtual “art galleries. , in particular by removing geographical constraints.

In the eighteenth century.
Encyclopedia , Vatl combines the words gallery, painting and art as follows : “The use of the gallery is still to collect there paintings by various ancient and modern artists. These collections, attractive in themselves because they contribute to the preservation of masterpieces of art, would doubtless require intelligence, sometimes rare for those who compose them, to locate each composition in a place most favorable to the artists. ” . Expressing himself in this way, Vatelet could not ignore the series of galleries that partially exhibited the collections of paintings of the Princes of Orleans, located in the Palais-Royal , and even, of course, those located in the Louvre Palace, such as the Apollo Gallery . At the same time, in Florence, the collections of paintings of the Dukes of Tuscany, accumulated in the Pitti Palace , located in the Palatine Gallery , are arranged in several rows, selected according to decorative criteria rather than period and school.

In the nineteenth and sixteenth centuries.
At the beginning of this century the princely galleries were open to the public and were no longer reserved for noble visitors or a select few. The concept of the “national gallery,” that is, the association, exhibition and preservation of paintings and other inalienable objects of art, shaped and predetermined contemporary museum policy. Thus, in 1849, Eugène Delacroix could admire “Rubens from the Grand Gallery of the Louvre” . By the end of the xixth century there are art dealers that open spaces for the sale of works of art, and they call “the gallery of paintings, sculptures, etc.. “; however, this expression had already come into use in 1840-1850, then it denoted a more or less large private space intended for the exhibition of collections; Thus, Honoré de Balzac makes his character, Elie Magus, a rogue art dealer, tell his house to impress the artist Pierre Grassu, “that there will be good wines, and I count on my gallery. an artist like you can test himself among the traders ” .