The Art Institute of Chicago

Monday–Wednesday
10:30 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Thursday–Friday
10:30 a.m.–9:00 p.m
(Free Admission 5:00 p.m.–9:00 p.m.)
Saturday–Sunday
10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

 

The Art Institute holds one of the world’s finest collections of art. Spanning over 40 centuries of human creativity, the museum's encyclopedic collection includes 10 separate curatorial departments. The museum has the third largest collection of art in the country, behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  




Among the most well known areas of the collection are Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, American art, Japanese prints, and contemporary art. Specific works for which the museum is known are: Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day; Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884; Grant Wood’s American Gothic; Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks; and Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist. The Art Institute also houses an architecture and design collection of more than 140,000 fragments, models, renderings, and related materials; one of the best museum libraries in the country, the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries; extensive conservation laboratories; one of the largest and most prominent collections of paperweights; and the Thorne Miniature Rooms, 68 truly unique small-scale recreations of European, American, and Asian homes.

Given to the Art Institute in 1894 by Mrs. Henry Field, a pair of bronze lions by sculptor Edward L. Kemeys stands guard outside the museum’s entrance and have come to symbolize the city of Chicago itself.

 

http://www.artic.edu/aic/enews/index.html