New York City — 4 of the Best Art Museums
You'll probably need 3-5 hours just to see the permanent collection at the Met, according to Go City, the largest multi-attraction pass company in the world. This is horrible advice. To make matters worse, Go City highlights "some of the best and most famous" areas at the Met Museum for you to walk through and suggests you start with Greek…
How To Find One Magical Museum of Art
Tired of cookie-cutter museums with antiseptic white walls and uninspired exhibits, we started our search in New York City, then flew to California, and finally traveled to the Midwest — in order to find a special home for art lovers, one magical museum of art. We visited the Brooklyn Museum, the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, SFMOMA, the Norton…
Paris – The 10 Most Remarkable Art Museums
Within the city limits of Paris, there are around 130 museums. In order to make your journey "magical", we have compiled a short list of the best museums devoted to art and culture in the French capital.
The Best of Boston — Gauguin, Monet & Sargent
When travelers tell us they plan to spend a week in New York, our initial response is to suggest that a 10-day visit to Boston and New York City would be ideal. For art lovers, Boston is a relaxed place to contemplate “Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?”, the monumental mural Paul Gauguin painted…
New York City — Fashionable Exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum
Fascination with the moon ranked high among the German Romantic painters, who regarded the motif as an object for pious contemplation. From February 8 through May 11, 2025, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City (colloquially, “the Met”) is presenting the exhibit Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature. Friedrich (1774 — 1840) re-imagined European landscape painting by…
Chicago — See the Most Extraordinary Art & Architecture in the USA
During stressful times, when one hopes to gain perspective on life's complexities, the best tonic may be a walk by a lake or through a park, perhaps a boat ride to take in the creativity all around us, or an inspirational visit to a museum. As the poet and mystic Thomas Merton observed, "Art enables us to find ourselves and…
Two Superior Museums of Art in the Heart of Vienna
After many visits to Vienna in recent years, we have chosen the Albertina Museum as Austria’s greatest venue for art. The Albertina is the largest museum of modern art in Central Europe. It possesses 65,000 drawings and roughly 1,000,000 Old Master prints, making the graphics collection (founded in 1776) housed inside the Albertina — with its unparalleled and unique overview…
Thyssen — the Best Museum in Spain
The best museum in Spain is in Madrid and, in our opinion, it is not The Prado. We have compiled a list of the best 10 museums for you to discover and enjoy in Spain; but first allow us to explain why we have chosen the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza as our pick for the #1 museum in Spain. The Thyssen possesses…
AMSTERDAM & THE HAGUE — Great Art in the Netherlands
With its friendly, multi-lingual residents and highly functional transportation options, The Netherlands should be near the top of your list for a perfect get-away in the off-season.
The Leopold Museum — 3rd Greatest Museum in Vienna
Vienna’s Leopold Museum is the best place to feel the dynamic power of modern Austrian art. Housing around 6,000 works of art — including the world’s most comprehensive collection of the talented, enigmatic Egon Schiele — the Leopold Museum takes you on a journey from the 1860s to the Wiener Secession, through the stylish era of Jugendstil, and into Expressionism.…
Monet’s Gift Is Now the l’Orangerie + Matisse, Hockney & Modigliani
The Musée National de l’Orangerie des Tuileries in Paris is housed in a relatively small building, and yet it is brimming with joie de vivre — an exuberant enjoyment and celebration of life! Originally constructed to house citrus trees during the cold winter of 1852, the l’Orangerie truly blossomed in the 1920s when the French State and Claude Monet transformed…
MODERN ART & EXPRESSIONISM — The Best Paintings in Switzerland
Basel is a Swiss city blessed with a variety of museums. For a survey of art from 15th-18th-century Old Masters to Expressionism and Contemporary Art, we recommend a visit to the Kunstmuseum Basel (where admission to the extraordinary permanent collection is free on Wednesdays from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. / 17:00 to 20:00 and the first Sunday of every month).…
Smaller Can Be Better — Art Venues in Madrid 2024
Sometimes a one-hour visit to a museum fashions the perfect art experience, and one great destination where you may choose to appraise this theory is Madrid. We recently visited three art spaces centrally located in the capital of Spain that offer you surprisingly high-quality alternatives to the Big Three museums… without crowds and highly-priced tickets. Museo Sorolla The Sorolla Museum…
Jacquemart-André — A Wonderful Little Museum in Paris
When Nélie Jacquemart acquired “Virgin and Child on a Throne” (pictured below) at the end of the 19th century she did not know who had created this important painting — for it was only in the 1930s that this masterpiece was attributed to Giovanni Bellini. The Musee Jacquemart-André on Boulevard Haussmann was created from the private home of Nélie and…
A Unique & Fabulous Pilgrimage to the Marmottan in Paris
The world's largest collection of paintings by Claude Monet rests comfortably today in the leafy hamlet of Passy (a neighborhood absorbed into the City of Paris in 1860) inside a townhouse with Empire-style salons. This property was purchased in 1882 by Jules Marmottan, a lawyer and mining-company director who collected pre-Renaissance art from Germany, Flanders and Italy.
