Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago is one of the great encyclopedic museums of the United States, and its collection of French Impressionist and Post Impressionist painting is among the finest anywhere outside Paris. It was founded in 1879 as a museum and school, and the Beaux Arts building on Michigan Avenue, guarded by two bronze lions, opened in 1893 at the time of the World's Columbian Exposition. Behind the classical facade the museum has grown eastward over the railway tracks and into Millennium Park, and the glass and limestone Modern Wing by Renzo Piano, opened in 2009, made it the second largest art museum in the country.

The collection runs from ancient Egypt and Greece to contemporary art, with strong holdings of Asian art, African and Indigenous American art, European decorative arts, arms and armour, prints, photographs, textiles and architecture. Visitors tend to come for a handful of world famous pictures: Seurat's Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Grant Wood's American Gothic, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, Caillebotte's Paris Street; Rainy Day and Van Gogh's Bedroom. They hang in the galleries of the second floor of the original building and in the American galleries, a short walk apart.

Galleries are numbered, and the numbers are printed on the free map. Rooms in the two hundreds on the second floor hold European painting and the later American paintings, the one hundreds on the first floor hold earlier American art and Asian art, and the Thorne Miniature Rooms are on the lower level. Allow at least three hours, or focus on the Impressionists and the American galleries if your time is short.