Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Whenever I’m going to be in a city for several days I follow
the weather forecast closely to make the best of what nature provides. The last
thing I want to do is spend a beautiful sunny day in a museum only to be
walking around town sightseeing and trying to take pictures in the rain. But
when three consecutive warm sunny days in a row are forecast, which one do you
pick for the museum? I chose day two of three because I did most of my turbo
tourism and must have walked twenty miles around town on day one. Shuffling around
slowly in an air-conditioned museum would be much less tiring after a marathon
first day than another of walking extensively in the hot sunshine.
The Musee the Beaux Arts de Montreal is considered the greatest
art museum in the country with the possible exception of the National Gallery
in Ottawa. This is quite fitting since Montreal was Canada’s first city for
most of the country’s history, only overtaken in population and commerce by
Toronto in recent decades. It is very clear from visiting both that Montreal is
still first in culture.
Montreal’s art museum has a strange layout, having clearly
first outgrown its original building and then outgrown the other buildings it
took over with multiples glassy extension wings. That means it is now in three
different buildings across Sherbrooke Street (the Fifth Avenue of Montreal)
from each other, all connected by an underground passageway. The historic
structure is now just a small part of what is now an extremely modern museum
complex overall.
Like other major museums, Montreal pretty much has a little
of everything from the history of art. One of its most notable galleries is a
huge collection of decorative arts concentrating on 20th century
design, taking up most of one of the three wings along with some non-western
and classical galleries. A second
concentration is naturally a large collection of Canadian art to which a second
building is completely dedicated. Finally, there’s the museum’s newest pavilion
which now houses European art from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century.
2025-05-23