You Gotta Know These Art Museums
- Perhaps the world’s most famous museum, the Musée du Louvre is located on the right bank of the Seine River in the heart of Paris. Housed in the Louvre Palace, which was a royal residence until 1682, the Louvre was permanently opened to the public as a museum by the French Revolutionary government in 1793. During renovations carried out in the 1980s, a controversial steel-and-glass pyramid designed by I. M. Pei was installed at its entrance. Works housed within the Sully, Richelieu, and Denon Wings of the Louvre include ancient Greek sculptures such as the and the , Leonardo da Vinci’s , and Eugène Delacroix’s .
- In 1785, Spanish King Charles III commissioned a building to house a natural history museum, but his grandson Ferdinand VII completed the Prado as an art museum in 1819. Deriving its name from the Spanish for “meadow,” the Prado’s holdings include not only what is universally regarded as the best collection of Spanish paintings, but also a number of works from Flemish masters, such as Diego Velázquez’s , Francisco Goya’s , and Hieronymus Bosch’s .
- Located in Florence, Italy, the Uffizi Gallery was originally designed by Giorgio Vasari to serve as offices for the Florentine magistrates under Cosimo de’ Medici — hence the name uffizi, meaning “offices.” After Cosimo I died in 1574, the new grand duke, Francis I, commissioned the conversion of its top floor into a galley. Its outstanding Renaissance holdings include and , both by Sandro Botticelli, and Titian’s .
- RYKES-“museum” Located in Amsterdam, this is the national museum of The Netherlands. Currently housed in a Gothic Revival building designed by P. J. H. Cuypers and completed in 1885, its most distinguished works include Rembrandt’s , Franz Hals’s , and Jan Vermeer’s .
- Founded in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1764 by Catherine the Great, its buildings include the Winter Palace, which was once the residence of Russia’s tsars. Its most famous pieces include Rembrandt’s and Henri Matisse’s .
- Originally known as the National Gallery of British Art when opened in 1897, it was renamed for its benefactor, sugar tycoon Sir Henry Tate. The original Tate Gallery has been renamed , and there are now three additional branches: in London, , and in Cornwall. The Tate awards the Turner Prize, a highly publicized award for British artists, and its collection includes by Roy Lichtenstein and many works by J. M. W. Turner.
- The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum is located in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Founded as “The Museum of Non-Objective Painting,” in 1959 it moved into its current home, a Frank Lloyd Wright building that features a spiral ramp connecting the exhibition areas. Focusing on modern art, its holdings include the world’s largest collection of paintings by .
- Located on the edge of Central Park and colloquially known as “the Met,” its main building on Fifth Avenue was designed by Richard Morris Hunt. Its collection includes El Greco’s , Jacques-Louis David’s , and John Singer Sargent’s .
- Better known as “MoMA” and situated in Manhattan, it has been connected with the Rockefeller family since its founding in 1929. Its collection includes Vincent van Gogh’s , Pablo Picasso’s , Salvador Dalí’s , and Piet Mondrian’s .
- Located on the western edge of Grant Park in Chicago, the main building of the Art Institute was built for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and features two lion statues at its entrance (which are often decorated for special occasions, e.g. with jerseys when Chicago sports teams are in the playoffs). It has an outstanding collection of French Impressionist and American works such as Georges Seurat’s , Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s , Grant Wood’s , and Edward Hopper’s .
- The Guggenheim Bilbao opened in 1997 and is — like its sister instutition in New York — less famous for its collection than its building, a Frank Gehry design that seems to be an abstract sculpture all its own. Richard Serra’s is permanently installed here.
- The in Trafalgar Square in London houses a synoptic collection of pre-1900 paintings assembled by government purchase and donation. It is home to British masterpieces including ’s and both and by . The museum also boasts several major highlights of European painting, from arguably of ’s series to exemplar Baroque works like ’s , by , and the of . Major works of the Italian and north European Renaissance are also represented, including ’s , ’s , ’s , ’s , and the later of ’s two versions of .
This article was contributed by former ÎÞÓǶÌÊÓƵ writer Edmund Dickinson.