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Top 100 Museums

Kirkcaldy Galleries

Kirkcaldy

United Kingdom

Kirkcaldy Galleries is the main museum, library and exhibition space in Kirkcaldy in Fife, Scotland. The land for the town's museum and art gallery was donated by John Nairn on the former site of Balsusney House, the home of John Maxton. This was opened in 1925, with the first chairman of trustees local cloth-manufacturer businessman John Blyth, the maternal grandfather of politician Michael Portillo. The art gallery holds the largest collection of paintings by William McTaggart and Scottish Colourist Samuel Peploe aside from the National Galleries of Scotland. The museum contains many significant works by the Glasgow Boys. Situated on the ground floor, is the museum's award-winning permanent exhibition covering the town's industrial heritage. The museum also has a cafe which displays examples of Wemyss Ware pottery, made in the town from around the 1890s to 1930s.In 2012 Fife Council undertook a £2.5m refurbishment of the building, which reopened in June 2013. It now contains a museum, library, children's library, PC suite, cafe, gift shop, meeting rooms, museum, local family and history rooms and gallery spaces. The Galleries opening was attended by local author Val McDermid, Wolf from Gladiators, MP and former Prime Minister Gordon Brown and artist Jack Vettriano. In 2015, Kirkcaldy Galleries became the first institution in Fife to display work by American photographer Diane Arbus.

Museum of Croydon

London

United Kingdom

The Museum of Croydon is a museum located within the Croydon Clocktower arts facility in Central Croydon, England. It showcases historical and cultural artefacts relating to the London Borough of Croydon and its people. The museum is owned and run by Croydon Council. It is located on the upper ground floor of Croydon Clocktower, but also incorporates the Riesco Gallery, on the lower ground floor, which displays Roman and Anglo-Saxon collections and a collection of Chinese ceramics. The museum originally opened under the name Lifetimes in 1995; and re-opened under its present name, following a major redevelopment and redesign, in 2006. Admission is free, and many of the displays are hands-on and interactive.

National Army Museum

Westminster

United Kingdom

The National Army Museum is the British Army's central museum. It is located in the Chelsea district of central London, adjacent to the Royal Hospital Chelsea, the home of the "Chelsea Pensioners". The museum is a non-departmental public body. It is usually open to the public from 10:00am to 5:30pm, except on 25–26 December and 1 January. Admission is free. Having reopened in March 2017 following a major £23.75 million re-development project including £11.5m from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the museum houses five galleries that cover British military history from the English Civil War up to modern day.This remit for the overall history of British land forces contrasts with those of other military museums in the United Kingdom concentrating on the history of individual corps and regiments of the British Army. It also differs from the subject matter of the Imperial War Museum, another national museum in London, which has a wider remit of theme but a narrower remit of time .

Leicester Museum & Art Gallery

Leicester

United Kingdom

The Leicester Museum & Art Gallery is a museum on New Walk in Leicester, England, not far from the city centre. It opened in 1849 as one of the first public museums in the United Kingdom. New Walk contains displays of science, history and art, both international and local. The original building was designed by Joseph Hansom, designer of the hansom cab. It has been expanded several times, most recently in 2011.

Shipley Art Gallery

Gateshead

United Kingdom

The Shipley Art Gallery is an art gallery in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear, England, located at the south end of Prince Consort Road. It has a Designated Collection of national importance.

Edinburgh College of Art

Edinburgh

United Kingdom

Edinburgh College of Art is one of eleven Schools in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. Tracing its history back to 1760, it provides higher education in art and design, architecture, history of art, and music disciplines for over two thousand students, and is at the forefront of research and research-led teaching in the creative arts, humanities, and creative technologies. ECA comprises five subject areas: School of Art, Reid School of Music, School of Design, School of History of Art, and Edinburgh School of Architecture & Landscape Architecture . ECA is mainly located in the Old Town of Edinburgh, overlooking the Grassmarket; the Lauriston Place campus is located in the University of Edinburgh's Central Area Campus, not far from George Square. The college was founded in 1760, and gained its present name and site in 1907. Formerly associated with Heriot-Watt University, its degrees have been issued by the University of Edinburgh since 2004. The College formally merged with the University on 1 August 2011, combining with the School of Arts, Culture and Environment and continues to exist with the name Edinburgh College of Art as an enlarged school in the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.

British Library

London

United Kingdom

The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and the largest library in the world by number of items catalogued. It is estimated to contain 170–200 million-plus items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the UK. The Library is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. The British Library is a major research library, with items in many languages and in many formats, both print and digital: books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings. The Library's collections include around 14 million books, along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 2000 BC. In addition to receiving a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland , the Library has a programme for content acquisitions. The Library adds some three million items every year occupying 9.6 kilometres of new shelf space. There is space in the library for over 1,200 readers.Prior to 1973, the Library was part of the British Museum. The British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997. The Library is now located in a purpose-built building on the north side of Euston Road in St Pancras, London , and has a document storage centre and reading room near Boston Spa, near Wetherby in West Yorkshire. The St Pancras building was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 25 June 1998, and is classified as a Grade I listed building "of exceptional interest" for its architecture and history.

Liechtenstein Museum

Vienna

Austria

The Liechtenstein Museum is a private art museum in Vienna, Austria. It contains much of the art collection of its owners, the Princely Family of Liechtenstein, rulers of the principality of Liechtenstein. It includes important European works of art, forming one of the world's leading private art collections. Its highlight used to be Leonardo da Vinci's portrait of Ginevra de' Benci, which was acquired in 1967 by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The museum, which was originally open to the public from the early 19th century until the Anschluss of 1938, had various locations, including the Liechtenstein Garden Palace at Fürstengasse 1 in Vienna's 9th District , and the Liechtenstein City Palace at Bankgasse 9 in Vienna's 1st District . The museum was reopened on 29 March 2004 in the Garden Palace, but after battling with low visitor numbers, it was closed for regular visiting by the public in November 2011. According to the official website of the Garden Palace, "the highlights of the princely collections can be viewed exclusively as part of an event package or a pre-booked guided tour".Objects from the collection have been sent on touring exhibitions to museums in other countries, especially the United States. In particular, displays are regularly mounted at the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in Vaduz, which is otherwise a gallery for a modern art collection donated to the principality of Liechtenstein by the ruling family. Other works from the collection fill the palaces and residences of the Princely Family in Liechtenstein and Austria. A catalogue of the artists featured in the gallery at the time of Prince Joseph Wenzel was compiled by Vicenzo Fanti in 1767.

Usher Gallery

Lincoln, England

United Kingdom

The Usher Gallery is an art museum in Lincoln, England. The gallery displays a collection of artworks by painters such as J. M. W. Turner and L. S. Lowry. Established in 1927, it is run as part of the Collection. According to 2019 proposals by the Lincolnshire County Council, the gallery is scheduled for closure.

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum

Glasgow

United Kingdom

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is a museum and art gallery in Glasgow, Scotland. It reopened in 2006 after a three-year refurbishment and since then has been one of Scotland's most popular visitor attractions. The museum has 22 galleries, housing a range of exhibits, including Renaissance art, taxidermy, and artifacts from ancient Egypt.

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Philadelphia

United States

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway at Eakins Oval. The museum administers collections containing over 240,000 objects including major holdings of European, American and Asian origin. The various classes of artwork include sculpture, paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, armor, and decorative arts.The Philadelphia Museum of Art administers several annexes including the Rodin Museum, also located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and the Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building, which is located across the street just north of the main building. The Perelman Building, which opened in 2007, houses more than 150,000 prints, drawings and photographs, along with 30,000 costume and textile pieces, and over 1,000 modern and contemporary design objects including furniture, ceramics and glasswork. The museum also administers the historic colonial-era houses of Mount Pleasant and Cedar Grove, both located in Fairmount Park. The main museum building and its annexes are owned by the City of Philadelphia and administered by a registered nonprofit corporation.Several special exhibitions are held in the museum every year, including touring exhibitions arranged with other museums in the United States and abroad. The attendance figure for the museum was 793,000 in 2017, which ranks it among the top one hundred most-visited art museums in the world. The museum is also one of the largest art museums in the world based on gallery space.

Wellcome Library

London

United Kingdom

The Wellcome Library is founded on the collection formed by Sir Henry Wellcome , whose personal wealth allowed him to create one of the most ambitious collections of the 20th century. Henry Wellcome's interest was the history of medicine in a broad sense and included subjects such as alchemy or witchcraft, but also anthropology and ethnography. Since Henry Wellcome’s death in 1936, the Wellcome Trust has been responsible for maintaining the Library's collection and funding its acquisitions. The library is free and open to the public.

National Railway Museum

York

United Kingdom

The National Railway Museum is a museum in York forming part of the Science Museum Group. The museum tells the story of rail transport in Britain and its impact on society. It is the home of the national collection of historically significant railway vehicles such as Mallard, Stirling Single, Duchess of Hamilton and a Japanese bullet train. In addition, the National Railway Museum holds a diverse collection of other objects from a household recipe book used in George Stephenson’s house to film showing a "never stop railway" developed for the British Empire Exhibition. It has won many awards, including the European Museum of the Year Award in 2001. As of 2019 the museum is about to embark on a major site development. As part of the York Central redevelopment which will divert Leeman Road, the National Railway Museum will be building a new entrance building to connect the two separate parts of the museum together. At the same time, the space around the museum will be landscaped to provide public spaces.In 2020 architectural practice Feilden Fowles won an international competition to create the museum’s new £16.5 million Central Hall building—a key element of the museum’s Vision 2025 masterplan.

Musée des Augustins

Toulouse

France

The Musée des Augustins de Toulouse is a fine arts museum in Toulouse, France which conserves a collection of sculpture and paintings from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century. The paintings are from throughout France, the sculptures representing Occitan culture of the region with a particularly rich assemblage of Romanesque sculpture.

Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery

Carlisle

United Kingdom

The Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery is a museum in Carlisle, Cumbria, in England. Opened by the Carlisle Corporation in 1893, the original building is a converted Jacobean mansion, with extensions added when it was converted. At first the building contained the museum and also a library, an art school and a technical school.The building, including the extensions, is a Grade I listed building, and the wall, gates and railings in front of the house are separately Grade I listed.The two schools were moved in the 1950s and the library in 1986. The museum expanded into the city Guildhall in 1980 and with new space available from 1986 it underwent an extensive redevelopment over 1989–90 and again in 2000–01. Since May 2011 the museum has been an independent charitable trust, the Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Trust. It is one of the three members of the Cumbria Museum Consortium, along with Lakeland Arts and the Wordsworth Trust. In 2012–15 and 2015–18 this consortium was one of the 21 museums or consortia to be funded by Arts Council England as "Major Partner Museums".

Yale Center for British Art

New Haven, Connecticut

United States

The Yale Center for British Art at Yale University in downtown New Haven, Connecticut, houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. The collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, rare books, and manuscripts reflects the development of British art and culture from the Elizabethan period onward.

Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

Brussels

Belgium

The Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium are a group of art museums in Brussels, Belgium. The Royal Museums contains over 20,000 drawings, sculptures, and paintings, which date from the early 15th century to the present.

National Gallery (Athens)

Athens

Greece

The National Art Gallery–Alexandros Soutzos Museum is an art museum located in the Pangrati district, Athens, Greece. It is devoted to Greek and European art from the 14th century to the 20th century. It is directed by Marina Lambraki-Plaka. Closed and renovating now. 06.04.2019.