Art History: Museums & Galleries

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Museum of art and antiquities in Oxford, England, founded in 1683 to house the collections given to Oxford University by the historian and antiquary Elias Ashmole.

The national repository in London for treasures in science and art. Located in the Bloomsbury section of the city, it has departments of antiquities, prints and drawings, coins and medals, and ethnography.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Largest museum in Russia and one of the most important in the world.

Foremost French museum of art, located in Paris. The building was a royal fortress and palace built by Philip II in the late 12th cent. In 1546 Pierre Lescot was commissioned by Francis I to erect a new building on the site of the Louvre.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Museum of 19th- and early 20th-century painting, sculpture, decorative arts, and photography, opened at the former Gare du Quai d'Orsay (Orsay quayside railway station), Paris, France, in 1986.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
London, one of the permanent national art collections of Great Britain. Its building, in Greek style, stands in Trafalgar Square. It was designed and erected (1832–38) by William Wilkins and was shared for 30 years with the Royal Academy of Arts.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Spanish art gallery containing the national collection of pictures. The building was designed as a natural history museum and begun in 1785; it became an art gallery in 1818 under Ferdinand VII.

National art gallery group in the UK, with museums in London, Liverpool, and St Ives.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Art museum in Florence, housing the world’s finest collection of Italian Renaissance painting.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedias
Institutions and papal palaces in Vatican City housing the art collections of the popes since the beginning of the 15th century.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Museum and art school, in Grant Park, facing Michigan Ave.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Boston, chartered and incorporated (1870) after a decision by the Boston Athenaeum, Harvard, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pool their collections of art objects and house them in adequate public galleries.

FromThe Columbia Encyclopedia
Art museum complex in Brentwood, Calif., operated by the J. Paul Getty Trust.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Major museum of modern art in New York City. Founded in 1939 as the Museum of Non-objective Art, the Guggenheim is known for its remarkable circular building (1959) designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
In Washington, D.C., memorial to the victims of the Holocaust ... Using a stark, harsh architectural vocabulary of industrial forms and unadorned materials, the building itself serves as an oppressive structural reminder of the period of the Holocaust.

The principal museum in New York City: founded in 1870 and housed in its present premises in Central Park since 1880.

(MoMA), New York City, established and incorporated in 1929. It is privately supported. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., was its first director. Operating at first in rented galleries, the museum specialized in loan shows of contemporary European and American art.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Washington, D.C., an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, established by act of Congress, Mar. 24, 1937. Andrew W. Mellon donated funds for construction of the building as well as his own collection of 130 American portraits.

The Smithsonian Institution was established by the U.S. Congress in 1846, carrying out a bequest by James Smithson (1765-1829), an enigmatic English scientist who left his fortune to the United States to found an institution “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”