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 the structure into a center for displaying fine art. For such a modest museum, the l’Orangerie offers a good permanent collection with Renoirs and Picassos, a dedicated exhibition space for temporary shows of the highest quality, and two spectacular oval rooms offering a peaceful presentation of Monet’s water lilies.

Tired of cookie-cutter museums with antiseptic white walls and uninspired exhibitions, we started our search in New York City, then traveled to the Midwest, and finally flew to California in order to find a special home for art lovers — one magical museum of art. We visited the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, SFMOMA, the Norton Simon Museum, the Getty Center, the Broad, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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 lose ourselves at the same time."

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 also possesses 65,000 drawings and roughly 1,000,000 Old Master prints, making the graphics collection (founded in 1776) housed inside the Albertina the most important in the world,…

Should you start your exploration of art at the Guggenheim, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, or perhaps the Frick Collection?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (located inside of Central Park) is closed on Wednesdays. Entry to special exhibitions on view at the Met Museum is included with the price of admission.

Vienna's Leopold Museum, housing around 6,000 works of art, is the best place to feel the dynamic power of modern Austrian art.

The Upper Belvedere palace, built between 1717 and 1723, today houses The Belvedere museum — the most visited art museum in Austria — best known for important paintings by Gustav Klimt.

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...

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 later, 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…

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 strongly recommend a visit to the Kunstmuseum Basel...

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.

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?" (shown above), the monumental mural Paul Gauguin painted on heavy burlap in Tahiti between 1897 and 1898. Across the Charles River from Boston, in Cambridge, amazing portraits by the greatest painters from the 17th- through the 20th-century await your gaze at the Harvard Art Museums.