The greatest museums in the world: description and photo. The largest museum The largest museum in the world city

Today, there are about one hundred thousand museums all over the world, and this figure is not accurate, since new ones are periodically opened and already created ones are being developed. In every corner of the world, even in the smallest settlements, there are local history or other museums dedicated to a particular topic. Everyone knows the largest museums in the world: some contain the maximum number of exhibits, while others amaze with their scope and area.

Major art museums

If we take European fine art, then one of the largest collections is collected in Uffizi galleries in Italy. The gallery is located in the Florentine Palace of the times of 1560 and consists of paintings by the most famous creators of the world: Raphael, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, Lippi and Botticelli.


No less famous is one of the largest museums of fine arts -. The beginning of the founding of the museum falls at the end of the 18th century, when it was decided to make the royal collection the property and heritage of culture, to give everyone the opportunity to look at it. The most complete collections of works by Bosch, Goya, El Greco and Velazquez are stored there.


Among the largest museums, it is worth noting Museum of Fine Arts named after A.S. Pushkin in Moscow. There are priceless collections of works by French impressionists, collections of Western European painting.


The largest art museums in the world

The most famous among the largest art is considered to be Hermitage. A museum complex of five buildings, where exhibits from the Stone Age to the 20th century are located. Initially, it was only a private collection of Catherine II, consisting of works by Dutch and Flemish artists.


One of the largest art museums is Subway in New York. Its founders were several businessmen who revered art and knew a lot about it. Initially, three private collections formed the basis, then the exposition began to grow rapidly. To date, the main support for the museum is provided by sponsors, the state practically does not take part in development. Surprisingly, you can get into one of the largest museums in the world for a nominal fee, even just asking for a ticket at the box office window without money.


Among the largest museums in the world, both in terms of the number of exhibits and the area occupied, their places of honor are occupied by Gugong in China and Cairo Egyptian Museum. Gugun is a huge architectural and museum complex, which is about three times the size of the Moscow Kremlin. Each of the museums has its own special history and is worthy of the attention of tourists.

Every year on 18 May, the world celebrates International Museum Day. It appeared in 1977, when at the next meeting of the International Council of Museums the proposal of the Russian organization to establish this cultural holiday was adopted. Since 1978, International Museum Day has been celebrated in more than 150 countries. Today we offer you to get acquainted with the 10 best museums in the world.

Louvre. Paris

This is one of the largest art museums in the world. Once the Louvre was an ancient castle of the French kings, built by Philip Augustus in 1190. As a museum, it was first opened to visitors on November 8, 1793. The Louvre occupies a space of approximately 195 thousand square meters, has a total exposition area of ​​60,600 square meters .m Today the museum's catalog contains 400,000 exhibits. For convenience, the exhibition is divided into seven large parts: the departments of applied art, painting, sculpture and graphics, the ancient Egyptian department, the department of the Ancient East and Islamic art, as well as the department of art of Greece, Rome and the Etruscan empire. In general, not even a week is enough to get around everything. Therefore, if you are an ordinary average tourist who has allocated only one day to visit the Louvre, then visit only its main masterpieces, to which special signs lead. Or purposefully come to the painting department - the most impressive - and look at the works of Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Caravaggio, Dürer, Goya, Vermeer and many others.

Museum of the Vatican. Rome

The Vatican Museum is the largest museum in the world: 1,400 rooms, 50,000 objects, and to get around all the exhibits presented, you need to walk 7 km. Of course, all visitors first of all seek to get into the Sistine Chapel. However, the structure of the museum is very peculiar: you can get to the farthest point - the Vatican Pinakothek - only by passing all the previous ones. So you need to calculate the forces. You should start with the Egyptian Museum, which is enough to go diagonally. and then run to the famous Belvedere, then to the Stanzas of Raphael. And, finally, to the Sistine Chapel, rightfully called the main local shrine.

British museum. London

The British Museum was founded on June 7, 1753 at the initiative of the government and on January 15, 1759 was officially opened to visitors. Thousands of people took part in its creation and development. The British Museum is also known as the Museum of Stolen Masterpieces or the Museum of All Civilizations. These names are justified. After all, the treasures presented in the museum were not obtained in the most honest way. For example, the Rosetta Stone, thanks to which scientists deciphered ancient hieroglyphs, as well as many ancient Egyptian monuments, was taken in Egypt from Napoleon's army. A similar story happened with the precious sculptural friezes of the Parthenon: the Englishman Lord Elgin took them out of Greece, having obtained written permission from the Turkish government. In the same way, the collection of the museum was replenished with sculptures of the mausoleum in Halicarnassus, the temple of Artemis in Ephesus and many other works of art. True, the exhibition of paintings in the museum is small - for that there is a National Gallery in London.

National Science Museum of Japan. Tokyo

This museum was founded in 1871. Most of its exposition is made up of natural science exhibits: stuffed animals, dinosaur remains and their modern models, etc. However, this museum is not only the largest museum in Tokyo and Japan, but also one of the best in the world. The museum has a "forest" hall and its own botanical garden, allowing you to appreciate all the richness of the plant world of our planet. And huge toothy skeletons hovering under the ceiling and appearing from the blue twilight will not leave anyone indifferent. Of course, here you will also find traditional Japanese exhibits, because the inhabitants of the Land of the Rising Sun are very proud of their culture.

Metropolitan Museum. NY

You have probably heard of the Museum Mile, which is located in New York between Fifth Avenue and 57th Street. It is here that the best museums in the United States are collected, the largest of which is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In this museum you can find almost everything: from Paleolithic artifacts to pop art objects. There are also collections of art from Africa and Oceania, the Middle East and Egypt, which can safely be called a rarity. Here you will find a special hall that has collected clothes worn by the inhabitants of all five continents for seven centuries. There is also an exposition of art and architecture of medieval Europe, painting of the 12th - 19th centuries, as well as musical instruments from different countries. However, the main place here is still given to American art.

Prado Museum. Madrid

Madrid can safely boast of having one of the largest museums of European fine art. It was founded in 1819. However, the building continued to be completed until 1830. If we recall the history of Spain, for several centuries art in the country developed under the patronage of the church and the elite. This explains the appearance of most of the museum's exposition, which was collected by the royal family and the church. Here you will find paintings by the well-known Raphael and the brilliant Hieronymus Bosch. The latter was very fond of Philip II: the artist's peculiar fantasy was able to fascinate the monarch so much that he even placed several paintings on the walls in his own bedroom.

Guggenheim Museum. Bilbao

This museum is located in the city of Bilbao, in northern Spain. It is just one of the branches of the Solomon Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art, located in the United States and the most striking of them, because it is recognized as the most outstanding architectural project in the world. There are thematic halls in the museum: the hall of surrealism, in which Dali, Magritte, Delvaux and Tanguy are represented, the hall of cubism, topped with masterpieces by Picasso, Léger and Chagall, the hall of futurism and abstractionism - Braque, Kandinsky. Its collection also includes works by Andy Warhol, Fernand Leger, Kandinsky and others. And here you can also see the collection of one of the most significant and extravagant collectors of avant-garde art - Peggy Guggenheim.

State Hermitage. Saint Petersburg

The State Hermitage is the largest art and cultural-historical museum not only in Russia, but throughout the world. It owes its origins to the private collection of the Russian Empress Catherine II. When the collection was already large enough, the Hermitage was formed and opened to visitors in 1852, being at that time the Imperial Museum. However, the founding date of the museum is considered to be 1764, because it was then that the Empress acquired a large collection of Western European paintings. Today the museum has more than three million works of art and monuments of world culture. Its device is rather complicated. It is a complex complex: six majestic buildings, headed by the well-known Winter Palace, which occupy the main exposition of the museum, are located along the embankment of the Neva River.

State Tretyakov Gallery. Moscow

The State Tretyakov Gallery is one of the most significant collections of Russian fine art on a global scale. The Russians owe the presence of such a rich gallery to the merchant Pavel Tretyakov, because it was from his collection of works of Russian art - the largest in the world - that the history of the gallery began. The Tretyakov Gallery is famous for its exposition in the engineering building Russian Painting of the 11th - early 20th centuries, which is part of the All-Russian Museum Association of the State Tretyakov Gallery, formed already in 1986. It also includes: the Exhibition Hall in Tomachi, the House-Museum of P.D. Korina and V.M. Vasnetsov, A.M. Vasnetsov and the Museum-workshop of the sculptor A.S. Golubkina.

Rijksmuseum. Amsterdam

The Rijksmuseum is the main state museum in Holland. It is housed in a huge old Neo-Gothic palace with Burgundian towers and sculptural reliefs, which was built back in 1885. Its main exposition is dedicated to the great Dutch artists of the 15th-17th centuries. Among them you will meet such world names as Rembrandt, Vermeer and de Hooch. The size of the museum is impressive and it is also impossible to get around it in one day, because the Rijksmuseum has 200 rooms. However, the main exhibitions can be quickly viewed, starting with the main exhibit - the famous work of art by Rembrandt's hands Night Watch. He has a place of honor in the Hall of Fame. And at the end of the museum marathon, you can go to the Museumplein - a huge lawn square with a wonderful view of the Museum Quarter.

State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

The annual rating The Art Newspaper collected information on the largest museums in the world for 2016 and revealed patterns. The Louvre, despite any terrorist attacks, is still the most visited museum in the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York) displaced the British Museum (London) from second place, the Vatican Museums skipped ahead of the London National Gallery. The State Hermitage is firmly in the top ten, and the Reina Sofia Art Center (Madrid) managed to jump into the last carriage.

MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum had to move

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Whitney Museum of American Art, which moved to a new building in midtown Manhattan in 2015, forced the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art to make room, traditionally dominant in New York. The Whitney Museum hosted five of New York's ten most visited exhibitions of 2016.

However, despite the meteoric rise of the Whitney Museum, the MoMA and the Met remain leaders among New York's museums. In the first place is still MoMA - thanks to the employees who every day during the long weekend in October performed the production of the French choreographer Jérôme Bel. This performance attracted up to 6.8 thousand people a day. The more traditional Picasso Sculpture exhibition, which was held in the same place, organized jointly with the Picasso Museum in Paris, was visited daily by about 5.9 thousand people.

Paris and Brussels are slowing down, Madrid is on the rise

Louvre, Paris

The decrease in the flow of foreign tourists after a series of terrorist attacks continues to affect the attendance of the Louvre, but it still tops the list of the most popular museums in the world with 7.4 million visitors in 2016 (in 2015 this figure was 8.6 million). Since 2014, attendance at the main French museum has fallen by almost 2 million people, which means a significant drop in ticket revenues - while the cost of keeping the public safe has risen sharply. Attendance at the Musée d'Orsay also fell from 3.4 million in 2015 to 3 million last year. But the Pompidou Center, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year, is less dependent on tourists from the US, China and other countries. Its attendance in 2016 increased by 275 thousand people and amounted to 3.3 million.

The terrorist attacks in Brussels last March also appear to have taken a toll on visitor numbers at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, which includes several sites including the Magritte Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. Attendance at the Belgian museum cluster has fallen by more than a quarter, from 776,000 in 2015 to 497,000 in 2016.

But the largest museums in Madrid, on the contrary, are on the rise. In 2016, the Reina Sofia Center for the Arts received 400,000 more visitors (3.7 million) than in 2015, and the Prado passed the 3 million threshold, something it has not been able to do since 2012. About 600 thousand people - or a fifth of the total number of visitors for the year - came to the Prado for a large-scale exhibition "Hieronymus Bosch", timed to coincide with the 500th anniversary of the artist's death.

Successes and failures in London

Courtyard of the British Museum, London

A slight decline in the number of visitors to the British Museum and an increase in the number of visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art means that London and New York are now going head to head. The Met does not share attendance at three of its sites: the main one on Fifth Avenue, the Cloisters in Upper Manhattan, and the Metropolitan Breuer, which opened last year. Together they attracted a record 7 million people. And with only one site, London's British Museum was visited last year by 6.4 million spectators.

The National Gallery in London has recovered from the strikes of 2015, which resulted in many of its halls being temporarily closed. With nearly 6.3 million visitors, it still outpaces the recently expanded Tate Modern, which has a record total attendance of 5.9 million. According to our data, the Tate Modern remains the world's most popular contemporary and modern art museum.

Place in the ranking Total number of visitors Museum City
1 7 400 000 Louvre Paris
2 7 006 859 Metropolitan Museum* NY
3 6 420 395 British museum London
4 6 262 839 National Gallery London
5 6 066 649 Vatican Museums Vatican
6 5 839 197 Tate Modern London
7 4 665 725 National Museum of the Imperial Palace Taipei
8 4 261 391 National Art Gallery Washington
9 4 119 103 State Hermitage Saint Petersburg
10 3 646 598 Reina Sofia Art Center Madrid
11 3 443 220 somerset house London
12 3 396 259 National Museum of Korea Seoul
13 3 335 509 Pompidou Center Paris
14 3 033 754 National Prado Museum Madrid
15 3 022 086 Victoria and Albert Museum London
16 3 000 000 Musee d'Orsay Paris
17 2 788 236 Modern Art Museum NY
18 2 714 271 National Folk Art Museum of Korea Seoul
19 2 668 465 National Gallery of Victoria* Melbourne
20 2 623 156 Tokyo National Art Center Tokyo
21 2 478 622 Museums of the Moscow Kremlin Moscow
22 2 370 051 National Galleries of Scotland* Edinburgh
23 2 325 759 State Tretyakov Gallery Moscow
24 2 259 987 Rijksmuseum Amsterdam
25 2 246 646 Soumaya Museum mexico city
26 2 216 880 Rio de Janeiro
27 2 076 526 Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam
28 2 023 467 J. Paul Getty Museum* Los Angeles
29 2 011 219 Uffizi Gallery Florence
30 1 949 330 National Portrait Gallery London
31 1 926 844 Tokyo National Museum Tokyo
32 1 876 908 shanghai art museum Shanghai
33 1 810 948 National Museum of Scotland Edinburgh
34 1 800 000 Art Institute of Chicago Chicago
35 1 592 101 Los Angeles County Museum of Art Los Angeles
36 1 461 185 Academy Gallery Florence
37 1 409 849 Acropolis Museum Athens
38 1 402 251 San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts* San Francisco
39 1 349 663 Art Gallery of New South Wales Sydney
40 1 333 559 Doge's Palace Venice
41 1 316 127 Australian Center for Moving Images Melbourne
42 1 285 595 Royal Academy of Arts London
43 1 267 280 Royal Ontario Museum Toronto
44 1 259 318 Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum Glasgow
45 1 240 419 Queensland Art Gallery/GoMA* Brisbane
46 1 234 443 National Museum of Castel Sant'Angelo Rome
47 1 205 243 Modern Art Museum Sydney
48 1 200 000 National Portrait Gallery/SAAM Washington
49 1 187 621 Serpentine Gallery London
50 1 171 780 National Museum of Modern Art (MMSA) Seoul
51 1 169 404 Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
52 1 164 793 Museum of Fine Arts Boston
53 1 162 345 National Museum of Western Art Tokyo
54 1 154 031 Gazebo Vein
55 1 151 922 Quai Branly Museum Paris
56 1 151 080 Whitney Museum of American Art NY
57 1 134 234 Dali Theater Museum Figueres
58 1 133 200 Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts** Moscow
59 1 130 556 National Galleries of the Grand Palais Paris
60 1 122 826 Cultural Center of the Bank of Brazil Brasilia
61 1 081 542 Tate Britain London
62 1 066 511 University Museum of Modern Art mexico city
63 1 050 000 National Art Museum of China Beijing
64 1 040 654 Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum Madrid
65 1 011 172 Imperial War Museum London
66 1 006 145 Museum of the Berardo Collection Lisbon
67 1 003 376 Saatchi Gallery London
68 991 149 Palazzo Reale Milan
69 965 929 Cultural Center of the Bank of Brazil Sao Paulo
70 960 354 Museum of Fine Arts Houston
71 958 353 Tomiv Otake Institute Sao Paulo
72 954 895 Picasso Museum Barcelona
73 953 925 Guggenheim Museum NY
74 933 683 Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Montreal
75 921 950 Ullens Center for Contemporary Art Beijing
76 910 561 National Museum of the Republic Brasilia
77 900 000 São Paulo Biennale Foundation Sao Paulo
78 885 798 Petit pale Paris
79 875 000 Modern Art Museum San Francisco
80 873 627 Art Gallery of Ontario Toronto
81 860 000 Ashmolean Museum Oxford
82 858 632 Gyeongju National Museum Gyeongju
83 855 810 Hong Kong History Museum Hong Kong
84 852 095 Egyptian Museum Turin
85 835 606 Århus Art Museum ARoS Aarhus
86 820 516 National Art Museum of Catalonia Barcelona
87 806 087 Huntington Library San Marino (USA)
88 802 722 liverpool museum Liverpool
89 780 879 Birmingham Museum Birmingham
90 780 000 Orangerie Museum Paris
91 780 000 Art Gallery of South Australia Adelaide
92 775 043 Philadelphia Museum of Art Philadelphia
93 770 714 National Museum in Krakow Krakow
94 769 119 Museum of Art History Vein
95 767 590 Minneapolis Institute of Art Minneapolis
96 765 000 Renwick Gallery Washington
97 758 300 German Historical Museum Berlin
98 755 577 National Gallery of Ireland Dublin
99 753 944 Caixa Forum Cultural Center Barcelona
100 753 252 Museum Broad Los Angeles

*Institutions located in several buildings are marked with an asterisk. The table shows their summarized indicators. Selected figures are: National Gallery of Victoria (International National Gallery of Victoria - 1,985,005, Ian Potter Centre: Australian National Gallery of Victoria - 683,460); National Galleries of Scotland (National Gallery of Scotland - 1,544,069, National Gallery of Modern Art in Scotland - 503,763, National Portrait Gallery of Scotland - 322,219); J. Paul Getty Museum (Getty Center - 1,569,565, Getty Villa - 453,902); Art Gallery of Queensland/GoMA (Art Gallery of Queensland - 572,762, Art Gallery of Contemporary Art Queensland - 667,657). The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cloisters, Met Breuer) and the San Francisco Museum of Fine Arts (De Young Museum and the Legion of Honor) - separate data not provided.

The Louvre, invariably for many decades the most visited museum in the world, is famous for its wonderful collection of masterpieces. But the vast majority of tourists travel to the Louvre from all over the world, only to personally see the two great works of art of our world. First of all, this is the great work of Leonardo de Vinci "Mona Lisa", and then they go to look at the ancient Greek sculpture "Venus Milo", a statue of Alexander of Antioch (presumably), which dates from the 1st century BC and only then follow the rest of the masterpieces of this wonderful museum.

2. American Museum of Natural History, USA

The American Museum of Natural History, located inNY, wasFounded in 1869, the American Museum of Natural History is the largest natural history museum in the world. He represents himself25 buildings, in which there are 46 exhibition halls containing more than 32 million samples and objects from various fields of science,including geology, zoology, astronomy, ecology, biology and anthropology.The museum has both classicas well as interactive exhibits,including the famous fossil collection, where you can seemassive dinosaur skeletons.


Founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great, the Hermitage is a huge museum of art and culture. The highlights of the collection include over 3 million works of art and world culture, thispaintings, graphic works, sculptures, works of applied art, archaeological artifacts and numismatic objects. The Hermitage is the most popular tourist attraction in Saint Petersburg andone of the largest and most prestigious museums in the world


The Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo contains the most complete and important collection of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world, with over 100,000 items and artifacts on display and in the museum's storerooms. From small items such as coins and pieces of papyrus to statues of pharaohs and entire rooms with eleven mummies. Here you cansee some of the most significant finds among the archaeological sites in Egypt.Perhaps the most famous partCairoMuseum of Egyptian Antiquities is its collection of Tutankhamen.


The Smithsonian Institution is the world's largest research and museum complex, with 19 museums and galleries, the National Zoological Park and various research stations. The Smithsonian contains over 137 million items mostly related to the history of the United States of America.



The Uffizi Gallery is an art museum inFlorence, which has one of the best collections of Italian Renaissance painting, especially the Florentine school. Even during the tour of the museum you will see a uniqueantiques, sculptures and over 100,000 drawings and prints. The pearls of the museum are the works of Leonardo de Vinci,Titian, Venetian works by Bellini and Michelangelo's portrait of the holy family.


The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the largest museum in the Western Hemisphere. Its collection of more than two million exhibits covers the whole world, from antiquity to the present. It is worth noting the work of European masters, the stunning works of Botticelli, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Degas, Rodin and other geniuses. An excellent Egyptian collection, showcasing the tomb of Pernb (c. 2440 BC) and the exquisite Temple of Dendur (c. 23-10 BC). The American Wing contains one of the finest collections of American art.


The Vatican Museum exhibits works from the huge collection amassed by the popes over the centuries, including some of the most famous classical sculptures and the most important masterpieces of Renaissance art in the world. The museum contains about 70,000 works, of which 20,000 are on display and the rest in storerooms.

Pope Julius II founded the museum in the early 16th century. The Sistine Chapel, with a ceiling by Michelangelo and frescoes by Raphael, is on the visitor's path through the Vatican Museum. It had 6 million visitors in 2013, making it the 6th most visited art museum in the world.


The Spanish royal family has been collecting masterpieces for centuries with passion and good taste. In addition to the stars of Spanish painting such as Velasquez, Goya, Ribera and Zurbarana, the Prado Museum has a large collection of Italian (including Titian and Raphael) and Flemish artists. Fernando VII opened the museum to the public in 1819, in the same neoclassical building where it is now, designed by Juan de Villanueva. The main attraction of the Prado Museum: "Three Graces" by Rubens.


The largest museum in the UKhas a magnificent collection in the field of archeology and ethnography, more than eight million objects,ranging from prehistoric bones, parts of the Athenian Parthenon, and Assyrian palace chambers to exquisite gold jewelry.
The main attractions of the museum:Egyptian Gallery, the world's finest collection of Egyptian antiquities outside of Egypt, inincluding the Rosetta Stone of 196 B.C.


TripAdvisor, a popular resource for travelers, named the best museums in the world.

In total, there are 591 museums in the TripAdvisor ranking, of which 25 of the best in the world were chosen. It is noteworthy that the Hermitage is ahead of such treasures as the National Gallery of London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Vasa Museum in Stockholm and the National Anthropological Museum in Mexico City.

About what masterpieces can be seen in the collections of these museum collections in our review.

1st place. Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

It presents one of the largest collections of art in the world - more than two million exhibits, ranging from the times of ancient culture and ancient Egypt to the canvases of almost all modern masters of painting. The entire collection of the museum today is divided into 19 independent sections. The largest in terms of the number of exhibits is the section "Art of Asia", where more than 60 thousand items are exhibited, reflecting the entire history of Central Asia. Another "celebrity" of the museum is the "Egyptian section", whose collection is one of the richest in the world: according to experts, it is second only to Egypt itself with its pyramids. For example, one of the halls exhibits a whole ancient Egyptian temple of Dendur.
Perhaps, perhaps, the “Arms and Armor” section, which has absorbed weapons from all over our planet, from the fifth to the nineteenth century, enjoys perhaps the greatest interest among visitors. The volume of the collection is about 14 thousand items, among them there are many things that were used by persons of royal blood, including the armor of King Henry VIII of England, King Henry II of France and Emperor Ferdinand I.

2nd place. Musee d'Orsay in Paris.

These are three floors of unique collections, mostly impressionists and post-impressionists. About 4000 exhibits. So here is the scandalous work of the French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeau - the sculpture of Count Ugolino, created by him under the impression of reading Dante's Divine Comedy. One of the most terrible characters of the work is depicted in an agonizing expectation of the death of his children. Another pearl of the Orsay - the canvas "Olympia" - one of the early works of Edouard Manet, one of the founders of impressionism. Also exhibited in Orsay is his "Breakfast on the Grass".

A separate room is dedicated to the work of Gustave Courbet: one of the most famous works of the artist, Burial at Ornans, and another equally famous painting, The Origin of the World, which is still able to shock the viewer, are exhibited in Orsay.
In Orsay, one can trace the formation of another great artist - Claude Monet. Several works of the great impressionist are exhibited here at once: “Women in the Garden”, “Magpie”, “Rouen Cathedral in the Sun”.

3rd place. Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago is also known for its French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, as well as American art. These are dozens of paintings by Claude and Edouard Monet, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh, Pierre Auguste Renoir. Masterpieces of the collection: paintings by Van Gogh "Bedroom in Arles" and "Self-portrait", "Two Sisters" by Pierre Auguste Renoir, "At the Moulin Rouge" by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, "Paris street in rainy weather" by Gustave Caillebotte.
In addition to painting, the Art Institute of Chicago houses textiles and photographs that characterize the culture of the early period of history in almost all of North America. The museum halls also exhibit furniture from the late Middle Ages from Europe and Asia, the armor of European knights and the coats of arms of famous families of the Old World, handicrafts made of porcelain, glass and silver brought here from different parts of the world.

4th place. Prado Museum in Madrid.

Opened in 1819, the museum has one of the world's largest collections of European art. Today, its collection consists of more than 7,600 paintings, 1,000 sculptures, 4,800 prints, 8,000 drawings and a vast array of decorative arts and historical documents. The permanent exhibition of the museum has about 1300 art objects. To date, Prado has the most complete collection of works by Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco, Diego Velasquez, Goya. Here you can see paintings by such masters as Raphael, van Eyck, Rubens, Dürer, Titian and other significant artists.

5th place Louvre in Paris.

Another museum with an exclusive collection of European paintings, sculpture and other fine arts from the Middle Ages to the dawn of Impressionism, as well as an unrivaled collection of antiquities from the Middle East, Egypt, Rome and Greece. The most famous paintings of the Louvre: "Gioconda" by Leonardo da Vinci, "The Beautiful Gardener" by Raphael, "The Little Beggar" by Murillo, "The Lacemaker" by Vermer, "Self-Portrait with Thistles" by Dürer.
The most famous sculptures of the museum are the Venus de Milo, found in 1820 and then acquired by the French ambassador from the Turkish government, and the Nike of Samothrace, found in parts in 1863 on the island of Samothrace.

6th place. State Hermitage.

The museum presents the entire retrospective of world art - from the Stone Age to the end of the 20th century. The art gallery of the "old masters" is very popular: here are the Florentines of the High Renaissance, the Bologna school, the "small Dutch", paintings by Rubens and Tiepolo, French classicism and rococo. There are Italian and Old Dutch "primitives", Spanish and English schools. Among the pearls of the collection of old European paintings are "Madonna Benois" by Leonardo da Vinci, "Judith" by Giorgione, "Portrait of a Woman" by Correggio, "St. Sebastian" by Titian, "The Lute Player" by Caravaggio, "The Return of the Prodigal Son" by Rembrandt, "The Lady in Blue" by Gainsborough. The museum has rich collections of paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Poussin, Titian, Veronese, Claude Lorrain and others.

7th place. London National Gallery.

It is one of the best collections of Western European painting, which contains paintings by almost all the great artists, as well as all schools of European painting. To date, the gallery holds about 2,500 paintings that date back to the period of the 13th-20th century. Feature of the exposition: all paintings in the gallery are exhibited in chronological order. Here are exhibited such masterpieces as "The Resurrection of Lazarus" by Sebastiano del Piombo, "Venus and Adonis" by Titian, "The Rape of the Sabine Women" by Rubens, Canaletto's landscape "The Stonemason's House", "St. George" by Tintoretto, "Holy Family" by Titian, "Holy Family" by Andrea del Sarto, Rembrandt's Woman Bathing in a Stream.

8th place. Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

The unique collection of the museum, accumulated over the centuries, contains many masterpieces of Dutch and world art. Here you can see the magnificent "Night Watch" by Rembrandt, several paintings by Vermeer, Van Dyck and Jan Steen. The museum has a rare collection of Asian art, an extensive collection of prints, drawings and classical photography.

9th place. Vasa Museum in Stockholm.

The ship-museum Gustav Vasa (Vaza) is created around a Swedish ship, which became famous for its stupidity, as the story goes. A very curious incident happened to him: he, being the royal flagship, sank after swimming only 1 mile! Many attempts were made to raise Vasa's ship. In the end, in 1961, it was nevertheless raised, restored for 30 years, and in 1990 a museum was put together around it. Today, the exposition presents items raised from the bottom in different parts of the world's oceans.

10th place. National Anthropological Museum in Mexico City.

Here is a unique collection of archaeological and anthropological artifacts of the pre-Columbian era found in Mexico. This is evidence of the culture of the Mayan peoples, the Aztecs, the Olmecs, the Toltecs and other indigenous peoples of the American continent.
The museum includes 23 permanent exhibition halls. The most famous exhibit is an Aztec artifact, the "stone of the Sun", also called the Aztec calendar. The diameter of the stone circle is 3.35 m, the thickness is -1.22 m, it was found in the center of Mexico City on Zocalo Square in 1790.

Rounding out the ranking of the 25 best museums in the world are the National Gallery of Art in Washington (USA, DC), the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, the Museum of Terracotta Warriors and Kin Horses in Xian (China), the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires and the Museum of New Zeeland (Te Papa Tongareva) in Wellington.

As a reminder, the Travelers' Choice awards are awarded to the best tourist sites in the world based on the analysis of millions of reviews and opinions of travelers. To determine the winners, an algorithm is used that takes into account the quality and quantity of reviews about museums around the world collected over the past 12 months.