In light of the The Art Newspaper 's annual international survey published each year on the most attended museums, I thought I would ask other art-related bloggers which their favourite art gallery was.
Bruce at Victorian History has already indicated his preferences. "My own personal favourites are Musée d'Orsay with its wonderful displays of both the impressionists and the post-impressionists, and the Musée Marmottan with its Monets, including some absolutely delightful caricatures".
Kristin at ArtEco was totally rapt in the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris. Gustave Moreau was a symbolist painter that turned his home into a museum in 1903, so that the paintings are still hanging where he left them.
Hermes at Victorian Paintings noted that his favourites were Bristol City Galleries; Fitzwilliam, Cambridge; Tate Gallery, London; and Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool.
One of my favourites is The Wallace Collection at Hertford House in Manchester Square, London. This may seem surprising since I am not a huge fan of 18th century French paintings and decorative arts. But the idea of using the architecture of a home to amass and display that very home's own collections is irresistible. I almost expect the Marquess of Hertford to wander down the hall to do a spot of dusting.
The Wallace CollectionSo what is your favourite gallery? All I need is a Comment with the name of the gallery, the city where it is located and a few lines on why you like spending time there.
My unscientific guess was that people associated with art, as lecturers/curators/collectors/artists or bloggers, would not necessarily select the world's biggest and most famous galleries - the Louvre in Paris; Centre Pompidou in Paris; Tate Modern in London, British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Let me refer you to one quick survey. The Guardian newspaper asked The expert panel: which is your favourite art gallery? in May 2008 and their results were as follows: The Serpentine, Kensington Gardens London; Museum of Modern Art in New York; Guggenheim Bilbao; the Neue Galerie New York; Kerlin Gallery in Dublin; the Ingleby in Edinburgh; Paul Stolper, an independent gallery in east London; the Prado in Madrid. This list provided quite an interesting mixture of the world-famous and the more local.
