Description of the attraction
The Art Gallery of Ontario is a magnificent art gallery in the city of Toronto, Canada. The gallery is located in the heart of Toronto in the Grange Park area. The gallery has an exhibition area of 45,000 square meters and is one of the largest art museums in North America.
The Art Gallery of Ontario was founded in 1900 by members of the Society of Artists of Ontario as the "Art Museum of Toronto." In 1919, the museum was renamed the Toronto Art Gallery, and in 1966 it received its current name. The gallery's superb collection spans a vast period of time, dating back to the 1st century AD. to this day and has more than 80,000 exhibits - painting, sculpture, engravings, photographs, books, installations and much more.
The Art Gallery of Ontario owns the largest collection of Canadian art in the world, beautifully illustrating the history of art in Canada, dating back to the days before the Confederation. Here you can see works by such famous Canadian artists as Tom Thomson, Emily Kar and Cornelius Krieghoff, as well as works by Canadian landscape painters from the so-called Group of Seven. This collection also includes exhibits illustrating the fine arts of the indigenous peoples of North and South America and such a form of folk art as the "Chukchi carved bone", which has long been common among the Chukchi and Eskimos of the northeastern coast of the Chukchi Peninsula and the Diomede Islands.
An impressive collection of European art is presented in the gallery with works of such world famous masters as Bernini, Rubens, Rembrandt, Goya, Degas, Hals, Picasso, Monet, Tintoretto, Pissarro, Gainsborough, etc. Contemporary artistic movements are illustrated by the works of Kline, Rothko, Gorka, Chagall, Hoffmann, Smith, Dali, Matis and many others.
Special attention should be paid to the unique collection of sculptures by the famous British sculptor Henry Moore, as well as an extensive collection of models of old ships and an impressive photo collection (more than 40 thousand, including works by Brassai, Burtinsky, Cameron, Evans, Flaherty and Finck).
The Library of the Art Gallery of Ontario is rightfully considered one of the best libraries in Canada specializing in art history and contains more than 165 thousand volumes of thematic literature, a field of 50 thousand catalogs (from the late 18th century to the present), historical documents, newspapers and magazines, microfilms and various multimedia media. The library and the gallery's unique archives are open to the public.
The Art Gallery of Ontario hosts a variety of temporary exhibitions on an ongoing basis.
