Henri Rousseau

The Musée d'Orsay is a museum in Paris, France, on the left bank of the Seine. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, an impressive Beaux-Arts railway station built between 1898 and 1900. The museum holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1915, including paintings, sculptures,... furniture, and photography. It is probably best known for its extensive collection of impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces by such painters such as Monet, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cézanne, Seurat, Sisley, Gauguin and Van Gogh. Many of these works were held at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume prior to the museum's opening in 1986. The museum building was originally a railway station, Gare d'Orsay, constructed for the Chemin de Fer de Paris à Orléans and finished in time for the 1900 Exposition Universelle to the design of three architects: Lucien Magne, Émile Bénard and Victor Laloux. It was the terminus for the railways of southwestern France until 1939. By 1939 the station's short platforms had become unsuitable for the longer trains that had come to be used for mainline services.
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The Museum of Modern Art is an art museum in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, on 53rd Street, between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It has been important in developing and collecting modernist art, and is often identified as the most influential museum of modern art in the world. The museum's... collection offers an unparalleled overview of modern and contemporary art, including works of architecture and design, drawings, painting, sculpture, photography, prints, illustrated books and artist's books, film, and electronic media. MoMA's library and archives hold over 300,000 books, artist books, and periodicals, as well as individual files on more than 70,000 artists. The archives contain primary source material related to the history of modern and contemporary art. It also houses a restaurant, The Modern, run by Alsace-born chef Gabriel Kreuther. The idea for The Museum of Modern Art was developed in 1928 primarily by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and two of her friends, Lillie P. Bliss and Mary Quinn Sullivan. They became known variously as "the Ladies", "the daring ladies" and "the adamantine ladies".
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The National Gallery is an art museum on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media and... Sport. Its collection belongs to the public of the United Kingdom and entry to the main collection is free of charge. Unlike comparable art museums in continental Europe, the National Gallery was not formed by nationalising an existing royal or princely art collection. It came into being when the British government bought 38 paintings from the heirs of John Julius Angerstein, an insurance broker and patron of the arts, in 1824. After that initial purchase the Gallery was shaped mainly by its early directors, notably Sir Charles Lock Eastlake, and by private donations, which comprise two thirds of the collection. The resulting collection is small in size, compared with many European national galleries, but encyclopaedic in scope; most major developments in Western painting "from Giotto to Cézanne" are represented with important works.
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The State Hermitage is a museum of art and culture in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One of the largest and oldest museums of the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and has been open to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display,... comprise nearly 3 million items, including the largest collection of paintings in the world. The collections occupy a large complex of six historic buildings along Palace Embankment, including the Winter Palace, a former residence of Russian emperors. Apart from them, the Menshikov Palace, Museum of Porcelain, Storage Facility at Staraya Derevnya and the eastern wing of the General Staff Building are also part of the museum. The museum has several exhibition centers abroad. The Hermitage is a federal state property. Since 1990, the director of the museum has been Mikhail Piotrovsky. Out of six buildings of the main museum complex, four, named the Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, Old Hermitage and New Hermitage, are partially open to the public. The other two are Hermitage Theatre and the Reserve House.
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The National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum in Washington, D.C., located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was established in 1937 for the people of the United States of... America by a joint resolution of the United States Congress, with funds for construction and a substantial art collection donated by Andrew W. Mellon. The core collection also includes major works of art donated by Paul Mellon, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, Lessing J. Rosenwald, Samuel Henry Kress, Rush Harrison Kress, Peter Arrell Brown Widener, Joseph E. Widener and Chester Dale. The Gallery's collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, medals, and decorative arts traces the development of Western Art from the Middle Ages to the present, including the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas and the largest mobile ever created by Alexander Calder. The Gallery's campus includes the original neoclassical West Building designed by John Russell Pope, which is linked underground to the modern East Building designed by I. M. Pei, and the 6.
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The Musée Picasso is an art gallery located in the Hôtel Salé in rue de Thorigny, in the Marais district of Paris dedicated to the work of the artist Pablo Picasso . The hôtel particulier that houses the collection was built between 1656 and 1659 for Pierre Aubert, seigneur de... Fontenay, a tax farmer who became rich collecting the gabelle or salt tax . The architect was Jean Boullier from Bourges, also known as Boullier de Bourges; sculpture was carried out by the brothers Gaspard and Balthazard Marsy and by Martin Desjardins. It is considered to be one of the finest historic houses in the Marais. The mansion has changed hands several times by sale or inheritance. The occupants have included the Embassy of the Republic of Venice , then François de Neufville, duc de Villeroi; it was expropriated by the State during the French Revolution; in 1815 it became a school, in which Balzac studied; it also housed the municipal École des Métiers d'Art. It was acquired by the City of Paris in 1964, and was granted historical monument status in 1968.
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The Barnes Foundation is an American educational art and horticultural institution with locations in Merion, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia, and Logan Square, Philadelphia. It was founded in 1922 by Albert C. Barnes, a chemist who collected art after making a fortune by co-developing an... early antigonorrhea drug marketed as Argyrol. Today, the foundation possesses more than 2,500 objects – including 800 paintings – estimated to be worth about $25 billion. These are primarily works by Impressionist and Modernist masters, but the collection includes many by leading European and American artists, as well as ancient works from other cultures. The foundation became embroiled in controversy due to a financial crisis in the 1990s, partially related to longstanding restrictions related to the original trust and to its location in a residential neighborhood. The relocation of the gallery from Merion to the site in downtown Philadelphia on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, for enhanced public access, occurred on May 19, 2012.
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The National Gallery in Prague is a state-owned art gallery in Prague, Czech Republic. It is housed in different locations within the city, the largest being the Veletržní Palác. Its history dates back to the 18th century , when a group of prominent representatives of Bohemia... patriotic aristocracy and Enlightened middle-class intellectuals decided to elevate what they called "debased artistic taste" of the local population. It houses the National Gallery's collection of modern art. The institution, which received the title Society of Patriotic Friends of the Arts established the Academy of Fine Arts and the Picture Gallery. In 1918 the Picture Gallery became a central collection of newly formed Czechoslovakia. The vast collection contains a large number of Czech and Slovak paintings and sculptures, including works by Gutfreund, Kupka, Fila, Benes and Bohumil Kubišta. The international collection includes numerous works by artists such as Picasso, Rodin, Gauguin, Cezanne, Monet, Van Gogh, Renoir and Klimt; many of these are donations from the collection of art historian Vincenc Kramář.
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The Art Institute of Chicago is a renowned, encyclopedic art museum located in Chicago's Grant Park. The Art Institute has one of the world's most notable collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art in its permanent collection. Its diverse holdings also include significant American... art, Old Masters, European and American decorative arts, Asian art and modern and contemporary art. It is located at 111 South Michigan Avenue in the Chicago Landmark Historic Michigan Boulevard District. The museum is associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is overseen by Director and President Douglas Druick. At one million square feet, it is the second largest art museum in the United States behind only the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In 1866, a group of 35 artists founded the Chicago Academy of Design in a studio on Dearborn Street, with the intent to run a free school with its own art gallery. The organization was modeled after European art academies, such as the Royal Academy, with Academians and Associate Academians. The Academy's charter was granted in March 1867. Classes started in 1868, meeting every day at a cost of $10 per month.
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The Beyeler Foundation or Fondation Beyeler with its museum in Riehen, near Basel, owns and oversees the art collection of Hildy and Ernst Beyeler. Art dealers Ernst Beyeler and Hilda Kunz , known as Hildy, created the Beyeler Foundation in 1982 and commissioned Renzo Piano to design a museum, the... Fondation Beyeler, to house their private collection. The collection was first publicly exhibited in its entirety at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 1989, and was subsequently shown at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sidney, . By building Renzo Piano's museum structure in 1997, the Beyeler Foundation made its collection permanently accessible to the public. In 2006, approximately 340,000 persons visited the museum. Hildy Beyeler died on July 18, 2008, and Ernst died on February 25, 2010. The Beyeler Foundation opened its doors on October 18, 1997, presenting 140 works of modern classics, including 23 Picassos.
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Naïve art is a classification of art that is often characterized by a childlike simplicity in its subject matter and technique. While many naïve artists appear, from their works, to have little or no formal art training, this is often not true. The words "naïve" and "primitive" are... regarded as pejoratives and are, therefore, avoided by many. The term naïve art is often seen as outsider art which is without a formal training or degree. While this was true before the twentieth century, there are now academies for naïve art. Naïve art is now a fully recognized art genre, represented in art galleries worldwide. The characteristics of naïve art are an awkward relationship to the formal qualities of painting. Especially non-respect of the 3 rules of the perspective  : The results are : Simplicity rather than subtlety are all supposed markers of naïve art. It has, however, become such a popular and recognizable style that many examples could be called pseudo-naïve.
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