Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum

Located on the Paseo del Arte (Art Walk), its permanent collection traces the history of European painting from the Middle Ages to the end of the 20th century. The Italian Primitives, the German Renaissance, 19th-century American painting, Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Russian Constructivism are the schools and movements most widely represented in the museum. Given the variety and richness of its holdings, with more than 1,000 works of art, it is advisable to begin your visit with the part of the collection that interests you most. The Collection: The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum's collection has its strengths in what other Spanish museums lack. The Trecento (14th-century Italian) paintings, such as Duccio de Buoninsegna's Christ and the Samaritan Woman, and the Early Netherlandish school, with Jan van Eyck's Annunciation Diptych, a grisaille (a painting that imitates sculpture), are key pieces in the late medieval art collection. The museum also boasts an exquisite selection of 15th-century portraits, including Ghirlandaio's portrait of Giovanna Tornabuoni and Carpaccio's An Unknown Gentleman. Following this, works by Dürer, Caravaggio, Rubens, Frans Hals, and Canaletto help us understand the evolution of art between the 16th and 18th centuries. Landscape and genre painting, particularly frequent themes in the 17th-century Dutch school and the 19th-century American school, can be studied extensively in the museum's galleries. This same concern was also expressed by Romantic painters like Friedrich, Impressionists like Monet and Degas, and Post-Impressionists like Gauguin and Van Gogh, all of whom are represented in the museum's collection. It also features outstanding works from the 20th-century avant-garde movements: Fauvism, Expressionism, Surrealism, Abstraction, and Pop Art. Picasso's Harlequin with Mirror, Kandinsky's Painting with Three Spots No. 196, Dalí's Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, Chagall's The Rooster, Hopper's Hotel Room, and Lichtenstein's Woman in the Bath are some of them. Currently, the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection is distributed between the second floor, where the Old Masters are located up to the beginning of the 19th century, and the first floor, where the work of the Modern Masters from Impressionism to the 20th century can be enjoyed. The ground floor of the museum, with its own entrance located at the beginning of the hall, houses the new installation of 180 works from the Carmen Thyssen collection.