Museum

Philadelphia Museum of Art.

A museum is a place or an institution that collects and displays items within one or more subject areas, such as natural science or visual art, usually to some degree for the purpose of education.

A more precise definition is found in the statutes of the International Council of Museums: "A museum is a non-profit making, permanent institution in the service of society and of its development, and open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits, for purposes of study, education and enjoyment, material evidence of people and their environment."

Types of museums

Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico.

Several different types of museums are found throughout the world.

Archaeology museum

Art museum

Natural history museum

History museum

Maritime museums

Science museums

Open-air museum

Museo del Prado, Spain.

Art Museums around the world

It is considered that the most important art museums are: Musee du Louvre, Paris, France, Vatican Museums, Vatican City, Rome, Italy, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, J. Paul Getty Center, Los Angeles, California, Musee d'Orsay, Paris, France, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy, Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, Tate Modern, London, England (part of the Tate group), Prado Museum, Madrid, Spain, and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. [1]

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Samuel Palmer, A Dream in the Appenine, ca. 1864, at Tate Britain.

Also important are:

Alte Pinakothek, Neue Pinakothek and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich.
Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
British Museum, London.
Buehrle Collection, Zurich.
Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Cleveland Museum of Fine Art.
Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK.
Frick Collection, New York, NY.
Gemaldegalerie - Berlin.
Guggenheim Museum, New York.
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Los Angeles County Museum Of Art.
Liechtenstein National Museum.
Museum of Modern Art, New York.
National Gallery, London.
National Gallery, Berlin, part of the Berlin State Museums.
National Gallery of Denmark.
Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA.
Philadelphia Museum Of Art.
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
San Francisco Museum of Fine arts.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington
St. Louis Art Museum.
Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum of Art, Madrid.
The State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
Wadsworth Aetheneum, Hartford, Connecticut.
Worcester Museum, MA.

3 Highlight paintings at The National Gallery, London.

Claude Lorrain, Embarkation of Saint Ursula, 1641.
John Constable, The Haywain, 1821.
William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839.

History

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Originally, museums developed from the collections of rarities and pieces of which many European monarchs and gentlemen assembled in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 18th century, it became common to put such collections in dedicated suites or buildings and make them accessible to select individuals.

The Capitoline Museums in Rome are a group of art and archaeological museums; it is the oldest public collection of art in the world; it began in 1471 during the Renaissance.

The first museum to offer more general, although still not universal, public access was the British Museum, which was established in 1753. The foundation for the British Museum was the extensive natural scientific and ethnographic collection of the scientist Sir Hans Sloane, who had bequeathed the collection for the purpose of creating such a museum.