Museum and City Guides

Every great museum city has a founding story, and most of them begin with somebody else’s property. In Paris it was a king’s. In London it was a banker’s. In Vienna it was a dynasty’s, and in New York it was a park’s. The guides in this section are about collections rather than logistics: how each city came to hold what it holds, and what that history means for anyone walking its galleries.

Paris: a palace turned inside out

The Louvre began as a fortress built in 1190 under Philippe Auguste and became a royal residence in 1364. Henri IV started the Grande Galerie in 1595 to join the Louvre to the Tuileries palace, and under Louis XIV its first floor began to display work by members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. The plan to devote the gallery to the royal paintings took shape under Louis XVI. Then came the Revolution. A decree of 1791 made the Louvre a museum of the arts, and on 10 August 1793 the Muséum central des arts opened to the public. It was meant from the start to be universal. Today it has nine curatorial departments, from Egyptian Antiquities to Islamic Art, which opened in 2012, and some 30,000 works on display. Its unrivalled holding of Leonardo goes back to François I, who brought the painter to the French court.

London: from Pall Mall to Trafalgar Square

The National Gallery was founded in 1824 with 38 paintings from the collection of the banker John Julius Angerstein, first shown in his house at 100 Pall Mall. William Wilkins’s building on Trafalgar Square opened in 1838. The collection has grown to more than 2,300 works, shaped throughout by gifts, bequests and donations. During the Second World War the paintings left London, and for much of the war they were stored in caverns at Manod Quarry in Wales while the empty building hosted lunchtime concerts organised by Myra Hess.

Vienna: a family collection

The Picture Gallery of the Kunsthistorisches Museum was assembled over centuries by members of the Habsburg family and now belongs to the state. Its depth comes from princely appetite. Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, who lived from 1614 to 1662, built a gallery of more than 1,400 pictures on his own, and most of them are in the museum today. The result is a collection of Bruegel, Titian, Rubens, Velázquez and Vermeer that reflects the tastes and marriages of one dynasty.

Berlin: a building made for art

Berlin’s first public museum opened on 3 August 1830. Karl Friedrich Schinkel designed it, and its cornerstone had been laid on 9 July 1825. The Staatliche Museen describe it as the first structure conceived solely as an art museum. King Frederick William III backed it for the enlightenment of his subjects, though he also insisted on economy. Ancient sculpture filled the rotunda, small antiquities and coins the basement, and the royal paintings the upper floor. It became a favourite destination for the educated middle class.

New York: the museum in the park

A museum was part of the plan for Central Park from the first proposal by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux in 1858. In 1867 members of the Union League Club formed a committee to push for a major art museum, and in 1870 they established the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The park commissioners offered land in 1874, and Vaux’s first wing opened in 1880. Richard Morris Hunt designed the Fifth Avenue façade and entrance hall, McKim, Mead and White added five wings, and after Thomas Hoving became director in 1966 the museum added glass-walled spaces including those for the Temple of Dendur and the Lehman Wing.

Using these guides

Read a city’s museums in the order they were built and the history of its taste falls into place. The articles below take one museum or one neighbourhood at a time, with an eye on how collections arrived and what is worth seeking out once inside.