A museum from the USA

Lets make a virtual excursion to the best American museums. Its really difficult to choose the
most popular as there are really thousands of them everywhere in the United States of America.
"The most popular" often means "the best", so they are definitely the most famous ones in the
USA. Top museums are always major tourist attractions. They can be museums of natural history,
science, art, childrens, wars, music or many others. The oldest museums were collections of
private individuals. The owner decided whether to open his collections to the public or keep it
closed. Today these institutions are dedicated to the exhibition and study of art, artifacts, historical
documents and other objects. Sometimes it is even difficult to imagine the volume of the
collections which make a museum one of the most popular not only in the USA but in the world.

The list of the best museums include classical and modern art, natural history, historical and
children's museums. They document and display the national heritage of the country through art,
historical letters, pictures and papers, fossils, and a lot of other relics of world history and
American culture. Its amazing but you can see some ancient artifacts and colorful painting free of
charge in some of the famous attractions as if to prove the idea: the best things in life are free.

So, the first visit is to the Smithsonian Museums, the largest in the world museum complex. It
consists of a dozen of museums in Washington and include the Natural History, the American
History, the Air and Space Museums, the National Museum of the American Indians and some
smaller ones. Besides this institution has a companion no-fee museum in New York.

The collections in the Smithsonian's museums are vast and it's impossible to narrow them down
and define the greatest hits. It is actually hard to appreciate the number of artistic wonders in one
visit. But without charge, you can come here as many times as you like.

The Baltimore Museum of Art was founded in 1914 and then it had only one painting. Today the
visitors are invited here to check out more than 90,000 works of art for free. The fanatics of art will
be thrilled by Matisses works, the largest collection in the world and the masterpieces from their
beloved artists, including van Gogh, Picasso, Czanne, and Warhol. Having explored the galleries,
one can take a stroll through the gardens of outdoor sculpture.

So, we have saved some money thanks to a free admission to the previous places and. as they
say, lets enter one more treasury of the country. It is situated practically in the heart of New York,
Manhattan. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the largest in the USA, house more than 2 million
works in its permanent collections. They were brought from different places and belong to different
periods in the history of Europe, Asia, America, Africa, the Middle East. There are special galleries
of American and Islamic Art. The Costume Institute is also located here and it contains the
examples of fashions from different centuries.

The visitors Must-See Works include: Hokusai's "The Great Wave off Kanagawa (the
masterpiece of the Asian Art collection); the Temple of Dendur (the Egyptian Collection)- an
original temple 15BC; paintings by Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Monet, Renoir,
Gauguin (the European Collection) and, surely, hundreds of others.