National Museum in Kraków

The National Museum in Kraków is the oldest national museum in Poland, founded in eighteen seventy nine when the painter Henryk Siemiradzki gave his huge canvas Nero's Torches to the city. It is not one building but a family of branches scattered across the old town and beyond, and that is the first thing to understand before you visit. The Main Building on Third of May Avenue holds twentieth century Polish art, arms and uniforms, and decorative arts. The Sukiennice, the Renaissance cloth hall in the middle of the Main Market Square, holds the nineteenth century Polish painting gallery upstairs. The Czartoryski Museum on Pijarska Street holds Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine and Rembrandt's Good Samaritan, and the Stanislaw Wyspianski Museum on Sikorskiego Square holds the pastels and designs of Kraków's beloved Art Nouveau genius.

Each branch has its own ticket, its own opening days and its own atmosphere. The Sukiennice is grand and gilded, with Matejko's battle scenes and Chelmonski's galloping horses under a glass roof. The Czartoryski is a quiet aristocratic house filled with antiquities, armour and mementoes of Polish history. The Main Building is a spacious modern museum with the best of Boznanska, Malczewski and the interwar avant garde.

A first time visitor with a single day should see the Lady with an Ermine in the morning, walk to the Sukiennice for the nineteenth century gallery, and finish at the Main Building or the Wyspianski Museum. Plan tickets in advance for the Czartoryski, where entry to the Leonardo is timed.