What are YOUR favorite museums?

In My Humble Opinion
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I was just thinking about all the museums I’ve visited over my lifetime and the ones I’ve liked the best. They might not be to most people’s taste; they might not be considered world-class, or necessarily have the best collection of any particular thing. But they are what I’ve liked best so I’m putting my list here, and I hope you will list yours too. I might want to put one of yours on my bucket list!

I am going to leave out zoos and aquariums here – while they could be considered museums in some respects, I think they should probably have their own thread. So let’s go:

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. This is Sir John Soane’s house, filled with all manner of things he collected in his lifetime. I try to imagine myself living amongst this mélange of antiquities, furniture, sculptures, and paintings. The house includes stained glass and has “portholes” like this:
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Which are meant to port natural light into the interior of the house.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Reached easily by tube in London (it has an entrance directly from the South Kensington stop), is another eclectic museum with a lot of cool stuff – paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, ceramics, furniture, clothing – there’s really something for everyone.

Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Portugal. This is the collection of Calouste Gulbenkian – perhaps a richer and less quirky version of Sir John Soane? Whatever you might like, there’s some of it here.

Musical Instruments Museum, Brussels. As an amateur musician, I loved this place not only for its amazing collection of instruments, but also for its presentation of them. When you go into the museum, they give you a tablet and a headset. Most of the displays have a number on them, and if you tap the number into the tablet, you can listen to the instrument that corresponds to that number. I loved this feature – it’s quite possibly the best interactive feature I have encountered in a museum. The building it is in is also beautiful.

Cleveland Art Museum. I’m sure I am biased since I grew up in Cleveland, but the building itself is architecturally beautiful and I’ve always felt at peace in its space. It’s also in a really lovely area of Cleveland. I was devastated when some asshole decided to blow up their Rodin stature of The Thinker, even though I was only 8 years old at the time. It’s still on display there.

Opera del Duomo Museum, Florence. This is a newer museum belonging to the city of Florence (renovated in 2015) and contains a number of treasures related to the Renaissance, along with some historical perspective on how some of those treasures were created.

I’ve also enjoyed some of the Smithsonian museums, particularly Air and Space, American History, and Natural History, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been to any of them, so I won’t comment on any of those. We really enjoyed our Garber Facility visit but I don’t know if that even exists now - maybe everything is at the Udvar-Hazy Center now.

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Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL

Musical Instrument Museum, Phoenix, AZ

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C.

Many more on my list, but these 3 come to mind.

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Freer Gallery of Art.

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A few off the top of my head:
US Air Force Museum / Dayton OH
American Sign Museum / Cincinnati OH
Buffalo Bill Museum Complex / Cody WY
Oakland Museum Of California / Oakland CA
Range Riders Museum / Miles City MT
Luna Mimbres Museum / Deming NM
Titan Missile Museum / Green Valley AZ

Plus…local museums/historical societies are always worth a vist. They always have a “hidden gem” that you won’t find anywhere else, and the volunteers are usually more than willing to chat about the life and times of their community.

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I’ve been visiting museums since I was a small child. I adore spending time in the big ones and have been to many of those already mentioned.

The Smithsonian museums are fantastic. So are the Carnegie museums and the John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, PA.

I also love to stumble upon some unusual, less known but interesting museums.

One I found years ago out in the middle of PA is The Columbus Chapel and Boal Museum. It’s a hidden gem that was part of the Columbus Castle in Asturias, Spain, and imported to Boalsburg in 1909. Lots of interesting and very old artifacts from Europe.

Another one is Agecroft Hall which is a Tudor manor house from the 15th/16th centuries. It was brought over to the US in the 1920s piece by piece and rebuilt in Virginia. Simply amazing!

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The Marine Corps museum in Quantico is pretty amazing. I hope the Museum of the United States Army is as good. I haven’t made it there yet.

The Rodin Museum in Philadelphia is spectacular. Close to but not as well known as the Philly art museum, it’s well worth the trip.

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The big classic museums and galleries like the Louvre and Uffizi and d’Orsay don’t need any promotional help (and they do live up to their reputations, but you gotta set aside lots of time), so I’ll focus on a few specialty places.

The National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam — We’ve been to a fair number of maritime museums, because the kids like the freedom of roaming around ships. The one in La Rochelle is cool for this because they have several boats open, and the HMS Belfast in London is also neat because it’s almost entirely open and you can go almost anywhere. But the one in Amsterdam is particularly good because (a) they have several restored boats to explore, which the kids loved, and (b) the museum proper presents an expansive and clear-eyed view of Dutch maritime history, with shamefaced yet entirely frank displays and information about their role in the slave trade. Really eye-opening stuff, how a culture can choose to confront its own dark past. (“Yes, this was us. We’re not proud, but we’re not going to pretend it wasn’t us. Here’s how it was.” Remarkable.)

The Rosengart, an art museum in Lucerne showing a specific collector’s lifetime accumulation, with an emphasis on 20th century European painters, especially Picasso and Klee. There are more famous Picassos elsewhere, but this collection is particularly well curated; I was able to walk my daughters from painting to painting, talking about the evolution of the artist, showing developing trends, pointing out recurring features, and so on. They were fascinated, and by the end they were making their own observations, so I have fond memories of our tour. They also have an excellent mini-collection of Mondrian on a lower level.

The Marmottan in Paris, focusing on Monet with a bunch of other artists sprinkled throughout (lots of Gaugin, including his early pre-tropical stuff that doesn’t get much attention). Another beautifully curated collection, presented in a lovely well-preserved house. The highlight is the lowest level, the “big finish,” a huge room with several of Monet’s epic-scale works. Took my breath away when I entered.

And since we were just in Copenhagen a couple of months ago…

The Museum of Danish Resistance is one of the very best narrowly-focused historical museums I’ve ever seen. Just incredibly well done, thoroughly laying out the sequence of events in Denmark from just before WWII to the immediate aftermath, explaining why Danish leadership chose to surrender to the Nazis right away and then showing the pressure cooker of oppression that led to increasing support for the resistance. It uses a fascinating structural trick to personalize the history, introducing five different historical characters who take different paths (including one Nazi collaborator) and following them as their choices wind through the wider sweep of events. Lots of interactive features, too, which kept the kids happy and busy (e.g. a simulated telephone switchboard from the period, where you could listen in on recorded conversations and pretend to be a resistance sympathizer eavesdropping on Nazi calls and collecting intelligence). My wife was extremely skeptical when I suggested it, but by the end she agreed it was a highlight and we were there until the staff kicked us out at closing.

But the Frilandsmuseet was probably my overall favorite of the museum-type places we visited in the area. It’s a “living history” type of place, akin to Colonial Williamsburg, presenting life in Denmark in the 1700s and early 1800s. They’ve taken a bunch of original farmhouses and other buildings from around the country, relocated them to this site, and restored or reconstructed them using authentic period materials and techniques. The center of the “village” is kid-oriented, with re-enactors who will teach you how to spin wool or bake rye bread in wood-fired ovens, or take you inside a windmill and explain how everything works; we saw a student group running around while we were there, and my own kids loved this stuff. But the grounds are enormous, with literally dozens of buildings, nearly all fully open and restored; out at the far end of the campus, the farmhouses are placed at some distance from one another, with fields between, giving you a powerful and visceral feeling of having been transported back in time. Even if you don’t have kids, this would be a wonderful place to enjoy a slow exploratory walk on a sunny day.

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I loved the Museum of London (being a Londoner), but that’s still closed during the preparations to move to much bigger quarters, which will be even better, I trust. And since I live nearby, the Museum in Docklands is also a frequent haunt.

The Amsterdam Resistance Museum is another favourite, and so is the Speelklok in Utrecht.

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Science and Industry - Chicago
National Museum of the US Air Force - Dayton
Wings over the Rockies Air and Space museum - Denver

The last one was a surprise find for me. Shit, I lived about 5 miles away for YEARS and had no idea it existed. It also has a nice beer garden where you are welcome to bring your dogs.

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Agreed! And the Philly Museum of Art is tremendous. I’ll also make a left turn and recommend the Franklin Institute.

And stepping outside of Philly, I’ll mention West Point’s museum. The historical artifacts there are absolutely breathtaking.

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I liked the Museum of London mostly because of its location, in the middle of lots of other Modernist buildings and also close to the Wall so as to showcase it. (I also appreciated its display about the Roman times with a graffito saying “Romans go home!”).

The Cleveland Art Museum was nice, and each individual section of the building was great, but it seemed mashed-together. I liked its large collection of armor.

Building-wise, the museum I like the second-most is the Herbert F Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell, done by I M Pei. Collection-wise it doesn’t have anything memorable on display: it supposedly has my favorite Bouguereau, Goose Girl, but did not have it on display when I was there.

And then there are the science museums that are mainly memorable in my mind for one thing: the Franklin Institute for its walk-through heart which is temporarily closed; a museum in Toronto, I believe the former Ontario Science Centre, which had the largest acoustic mirror I’ve seen, sending conversations over a hundred feet to another person; and the Natural History Museum in Utah, with its display of the former water levels of the Great Salt Lake, where you could press a button and actual water would start to fill the display to show how the water levels have changed, although with my luck, that could also be gone by now!

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Greenfield Village and Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI. When my kids were little, we lived about a mile from it and we were there multiple times a week-- the Village in the summer, the Museum in the cold months. Never got old.

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Galleries are OK, though, I’m going to assume?

Science Museum, London
Tate Modern in London
Fashion Museum, Bath
Doge’s Palace, Venice
Royal Armouries (I’ve only been to the Tower of London part)
Musée de Cluny in Paris

Seconded.

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2 of them I enjoyed: the Mutter Museum. Lots of interesting and odd medical stuff.

And the National Watch & Clock Museum. Didn’t expect to like it, but I did.

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I practically grew up at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. I loved the dinosaurs, especially. But the Museum has changed considerably through the years. I think the only parts still unchanged are The Hall of Northwest Coast Indians (which still has the same floor tiling it always did() and the Hall of Man and Nature. I haven’t been back there in years.

My second favorite was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, right across Central Park from the AMNH. Huge art museum, with surprising stuff in its collection. They’ve got the Mastaba or Per-Neb and an entire (small) Egyptian temple.

The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia was a frequent destination for trips when I was a kid. It’s changed over time, too, but kept a lot of its exhibits. It has one of the earliest airplanes that the Wright brothers sold. And, of course, it has the giant walk-through human heart.

The Mutter Museum, also in Philadelphia, has a wonderful collection of weird human organs and the like, including a 2.4 meter-long “megacolon” of an unfortunate man.

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Another one I liked, and didn’t think I would, was the National Postal Museum in DC. It’s part of the Smithsonian, and has a lot of hands-on stuff.

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Among my favorite museums are

The Imperial War Museum in London, which has really varied exhibits and a lot of preserved ephemera to loiter over for hours.

MOMA in New York. I used to travel quite a bit to NYC and would always try to get over there at lunch time. Such a delightful place to wander and find something familiar or new.

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One of the weirder little museums – which still appears to be there, from the internet – is the museum at the Cleveland-Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry in Emery County, Utah. Evidently the overall site is now called Jurassic National Monument, which shows the effect of Pop culture on things. The Cleveland-Llloyd Quarry is the world’s leading source of Allosaurus skeletons, and has exported them to museums all over the world. Evidently it was a sticky mud pit in its day, and like the petroleum-based La Brea Tar Pits it lured herbivores into its trap, who then lured carnivores in after them in search of a quick meal.

Unlike the larger and more famous Dinosaur National Monument (also in Utah), this has always been a much smaller and less flashy effort. When I visited, ages ago they had quonset huts covering the excavations. But there was also an air-conditioned one-room museum with a mounted Allosaurus skeleton, which seemed such an anomaly out there in the middle of the desert. You drove over dirt roads for dozens of miles, with no obvious power or telephone lines in sight, and suddenly there you were with air conditioning and cool water in the water fountains and a nifty exhibit. It’s as if they packaged up a room from a big-city museum and dropped it into the Utah desert.

There were also hiking loops. You could actually touch fossil dinosaur bones sticking out of the ground. It was encouraged.

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The dinosaur place sounds absolutely amazing!

A few that haven’t been mentioned:

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore MD (thewalters.org) has a small, but impressive collection of art from around the world, including a beautiful Rafael Madonna. The interior of the building is really lovely.

The Met Cloisters in New York CIty. Separate from the Metropolotian Museum, it’s a museum devoted to the art of the European Middle Ages. Parts of the buildings were actually taken medieval monasteries in France and brought to the site.

The Getty Villa in Los Angeles, a recreated Roman Villa (based on the Villa of the Papyri in Pompeii) that houses ancient Greek and Roman art, including an incredible collection of glasswear. It’s in a beautiful setting on a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean. (This is separate from the Getty Museum which has European art and is on a hill overlooking the 405 freeway, and which is also pretty cool.)

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I’ve enjoyed most museums I’ve visited, both big and small, but Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute was the first and remains closest to my heart. As a frequent grade school class trip destination, I must have visited at least three times with classmates, and maybe even a couple of times with my parents. From the very beginning, the place mesmerized me. The giant walk-through heart, the massive steam locomotive, the intriguing old bicycle collection, the Fels Planetarium – each exhibit was a new adventure. Decades later, I had the joy of taking my own kids there, and it made me feel like a kid again.