Museum of Fine Arts - Szepmuveszeti Muzeum, Budapest

On the left of the wonderful Hosok tere there is the nice Szepmuveszeti Muzeum, museum of Fine Arts. It was built by Albert Schickedanz and Fulop Herzog and it has got a neoclassical facade. The timpan is a copy of the Centauromachia of the Temple of Zeus in Olympia (Greece). The major part of the collection was created in 1802 when people created the National Museum of Hungary and they started to collect many old pieces and paintings. In 1870 arrived from Vienna the Esterhazy collection. In the 1957 the Magyar paintigs were transfered in the Etnographic Museum and in the 1975 transfered to the Buda Castle. Inside there are paintings made by Chagall, Severini, Guttuso, Leonardo da Vinci (drawings), Segna da Bonaventura, Sassetta, Verrocchio, Giovanni Santi, Piero di Cosimo, Ghirlandaio, Gentile Bellini, Giorgione, Veronese, Tiziano, Bronzino, Raffaello, Correggio, Lotto, Carracci, Guardi, Memling, David, de Witte, Cuyp, Rembrandt, Durer, Brughel, van Dyck, El Greco, Murillo, Goya, Ribera, Kupezky, cranach the old, Poussin, Corot, Coubert, Monet, Manet, Pisarro, Cezanne, Toulouse Lautrec, Gauguin, REnoir and much more.

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While Hungarian art is on display at the national gallery located at Buda Castle, the country's most important international collection is housed at the Museum of Fine Arts, located at Heroes' Square. Its collection comprises over 100,000 pieces divided into six main categories: Egyptian art, Classical antiquities, Old Master paintings, Sculpture, Print and drawings, and Art after 1800. The great Italian and Flemish masters are well represented, as are the French impressionists. It is a medium-sized museum that can be visited at a leisurely pace within a few hours.

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With over a hundred thousand works of art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest needs an enormous building to house them, and it has one. The huge, imposing neoclassical museum was built after the smaller Palace of Arts opposite it on Heroes Square, but now absolutely dwarfs it. If it wasn't set back so far from the square, it would cast a huge shadow across it.

While the Palace of Arts focuses on contemporary art, the Szépművészeti Múzeum concentrates on older works, especially the masters. It has over 3000 masterpieces covering five centuries, and featuring works by the likes of Rubens, Titian and Goya. It has some other impressive sections too, including ancient Egyptian art and a collection of sculptures that includes work from Leonardo da Vinci.

Entry: 1400 forints. Closed mondays.

This museum looks like Greek temple and was finished in 1906. The exhibition contains the art works of Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Italian, French and Flemish painting.

I had no chance to visit this museum, but, as I am very interested in Ancient European culture, I hope to do that in future :)

The Museum of Fine Arts - a fine neo-classical, greek-style building close to the Heroes Square - houses a fine collection of all non-hungarian artists (the Hungarian painters can be found in the National Gallery in Buda Castle). Marvelous - you shouldn`t miss it. The only part of the exhibition that is less worthwhile and might be skipped is the Egyptian Collection, but the paintings collection is simply stunning.

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Beautiful collections. My personal selection: the Egyptian and the Flandres/Italian/Spanish paintings.

The museum shop is great with lots of nice and useful books, notebooks and souvenirs.

The coffee shop is ideal to have a talk with colleagues having a cappuccino...

As you can see, there was a Van Gogh exhibit when we were in Budapest. The hours of operation are Tues-Sun, 10:00am to 5:30pm. To accomodate everybody who wants to see the Van Gogh exhibit, the museum is also open on Monday temporarily. The exhibit runs through 3/20/07. Some of the collections within the museum include Egyptian artifacts, German art, French/Dutch art, Sculpture, Italian art, Spanish art, 19th and 20th century works.

The museum stands on the northern side of Heroes' Square and houses the National collection of non-Hungarian art with items dating back to the Egyptian era. Some count this as one of the most impressive galleries in Central Europe as it's home to works by famed artists such as El Greco, Goya, Rembrant and Rubens. A strong core of the art collection was collected by the Esterh?zy family, once one of the most influential aristocratic families in the country. There are often temporary exhibitions on show and it's therefore worth checking to see what's on beforehand. However, the permanent displays alone are well-worth a visit.

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Unfortunately, when you stay in a city for several days, you are bound to be there on a szünnap (closing day) and miss out on some of the galleries and museums. In order to get in everything I wanted to see, I had to plan to visit Heroes Square on a Monday, which meant that both the Museum of Fine Arts and the Palace of Art were closed. Nevertheless, I have visited one of the galleries before (5 years ago), so I wasn’t too put out by it. The Museum of Fine Arts is sort of the international equivalent of the Hungarian National Gallery in Buda Castle, as it houses a huge collection of artwork spanning from Ancient Egyptian pieces all the way up to the 20th century, although its specialities are the periods before the 1800s, in particular drawings, prints, sculpture and paintings from the Great Masters, including pieces by Da Vinci, Rembrandt and the Spanish masters. Even if you don’t go into the Museum, the building itself is quite a draw, as it is in magnificent neo-Classical style with huge columns. It was built at the start of the 20th century, when the entire area was being developed, and some of its collection is a reassembly of older collections belonging to the National Gallery and landed estates.

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This is 1 of 2 museums at both sides of Heroes’ Square. It's on the left.

The Museum of Fine Arts opened its doors in 1906.

It has one of the best art collections in the world, with more than 120,000 works, including the remarkable Egyptian, Old Masters and Modern collections.