Hungarian National Gallery

The museum's own figures put the collection at around 110,000 works, and its actual strength is concentration rather than breadth: it is not trying to be an encyclopaedic museum but a complete record of art made in the Kingdom of Hungary and, later, Hungary itself, from the 11th century to the present. The Old Hungarian Collection's winged altarpieces are, on the museum's own account, the largest such group in Central Europe. The 19th and 20th Century Paintings collection, at roughly 10,000 items, is the deepest holding anywhere of Munkacsy, Szinyei Merse and the Nagybanya and Godollo colony painters, and the Prints and Drawings collection's 81,000 sheets extend that record on paper from the late 18th century to about 1960. What the museum has never held in comparable depth is international art after 1800, which is precisely the department now arriving from the Museum of Fine Arts as the two institutions' 2012 reunification continues.

The Royal Palace on Castle Hill has been rebuilt more times than it has been left alone. Its history reaches back to the 14th century and the reigns of Louis the Great, Sigismund and Matthias Corvinus; the Turkish occupation from 1541 and the Battle of Buda in 1686 left it badly damaged, and its Baroque reconstruction began under Maria Theresa in 1749. Miklos Ybl and Alajos Hauszmann expanded it again at the end of the 19th century, and it was damaged once more in the Second World War, with reconstruction beginning only in the 1960s.

The Hungarian National Gallery itself is younger than the building it now occupies. It was established on 5 October 1957 to display Hungarian art on its own terms, built from the New Hungarian Picture Gallery at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Hungarian holdings of that museum's sculpture, medal, and print and drawing collections - roughly 6,000 paintings, 2,100 sculptures, 3,100 medals, 11,000 drawings and 5,000 prints at the outset. It opened in a building that had formerly housed the Supreme Court and today houses the Museum of Ethnography. The Hungarian government designated the Royal Palace of Buda as its permanent home in 1959, but the move did not happen until 1975, into Buildings B, C and D, refurbished for the purpose; the exhibitions that October opened in what the museum's own history calls a provisional form. The Old Hungarian Collection, transferred from the Museum of Fine Arts, followed soon after and only then, after decades in storage, became a public treasure. Building A was added to the museum's exhibition space in 2005.

What is inside is not one collection but several, run as separate curatorial departments that only partly line up with the eight permanent exhibitions a visitor actually walks through. The Old Hungarian Collection covers the 11th century to 1800: stone carving salvaged from cathedrals, palaces and monastic buildings; early wooden sculpture and panel paintings that once furnished church interiors, including what the museum describes as the largest collection of winged altarpieces in Central Europe; and, from the late Renaissance and Baroque, large-scale altarpieces, portraits, still lifes and the new secular genres of the later 18th century. The 19th and 20th Century Paintings collection, some 10,000 items, carries the story from Biedermeier portraiture through history painting, the plein-air and naturalist painting of Mihaly Munkacsy and Pal Szinyei Merse, the Nagybanya and Godollo artists' colonies, the individual routes of Tivadar Csontvary Kosztka and Laszlo Mednyanszky, and on to the interwar Gresham group. Alongside the paintings sit some 10,000 items of sculpture, medals and plaques, and a Prints and Drawings collection of around 81,000 sheets running from the late 18th century to about 1960. A Contemporary Collection, shown in the permanent exhibition Shifts - Hungarian Art After 1945, has been gathering work made since the war, and a museum library founded on the old Metropolitan Picture Gallery's books serves all of it.

Two things that are easy to miss sit outside this list of departments entirely. The Habsburg Palatine Crypt, under the site of a chapel demolished in 1961, holds the remains of Archduke Joseph, Palatine of Hungary from 1795 to 1847, and 23 of his descendants, in a chamber whose marble and bronze sculpture by Gyorgy Zala and Alajos Strobl the museum calls the only part of the palace still showing something of its original 19th-century decoration; the crypt was broken into and the Archduke's remains desecrated in 1973, and was walled up before being restored and reconsecrated in 1987. It can only be seen on a guided visit booked at least a week in advance. And the Dome above the palace, the highest point of the building and a fixture of Budapest's skyline, is open to any exhibition ticket-holder for a view over the city and the Danube, weather allowing.

In 2012 the Hungarian National Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts were placed under one director, Laszlo Baan, in what the museum now calls a reunification of the two institutions' collections. That decision followed years of open conflict: the Gallery's own director, Ferenc Csak, resigned in December 2011 rather than oversee it, calling the process very unprofessional, anti-democratic and short-sighted, and the museum operated under interim leadership into 2012. Since then the reunification has proceeded piece by piece rather than all at once. In 2018 the Baroque portion of the Old Hungarian Collection, shown as Art in Hungary 1600-1800, moved into the newly renovated Museum of Fine Arts building; a further move of the medieval and Renaissance material to the same building was announced for autumn 2019, but on the evidence gathered for this record it has not happened - the winged altarpieces, Gothic panel paintings and Renaissance stone carvings remain on show at Buda Castle years past that date, and the museum's own collection page still describes the Hungarian National Gallery as continuing to house them 'up until the instalment' of new exhibitions elsewhere. Movement is also happening in the other direction: the Collection of International Art after 1800 is moving out of the Museum of Fine Arts, which now serves only art from antiquity to 1800, and into the Hungarian National Gallery - a change the museum itself describes as the first of several years of steps still to come.

The reunification has always had a building attached to it. The original 2008 proposal, taken up by Fidesz in its 2010 election campaign, envisaged a new museum quarter on Andrassy ut near City Park, expected at the time to take eight years and 20 billion forints and to begin construction by 2014. What has actually been built, after years of delay, is the New National Gallery: a structure designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese firm SANAA, planned for the site of the demolished Petofi Csarnok concert hall inside the Liget Budapest cultural park, intended to house the combined modern collections of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Hungarian National Gallery under one roof. Budapest's mayor, Gergely Karacsony, elected in 2019 on an environmental platform, halted construction that December, arguing it would have an enormous impact on one of the city's limited green spaces and suggesting brownfield alternatives instead; the project sat suspended for years while other Liget Budapest buildings, including the House of Hungarian Music and the Museum of Ethnography, went ahead. Reporting from October 2024 describes the procurement process for the New National Gallery as under way again, with construction expected to begin in 2025 and the museum's own director-general quoted as targeting an opening by the end of the decade - realistically, on that timeline, around 2029 or 2030.

What this means for the Buda Castle building the Hungarian National Gallery occupies today is, on the sources gathered here, genuinely unresolved. Earlier reporting from 2019 described a plan under which the existing Buda Castle gallery would close once the new building opened, with its holdings divided between the Museum of Fine Arts and the new gallery so that Hungary's national art collections could be reunited 'as they were before the Communist period'. No source consulted for this record confirms whether that specific plan still holds after the 2019-2024 suspension and restart, what would happen to the medieval and Old Hungarian material that has not moved to the Museum of Fine Arts as planned, or what use Buda Castle's galleries would be put to afterward. What is certain, and directly confirmed on the museum's own site as of the date of this research, is that none of this has happened yet: the Hungarian National Gallery is open at Buda Castle today, selling tickets to eight permanent exhibitions and three temporary ones.

The museum keeps long, simple hours - 10:00 to 18:00 every day except the last Monday of each month - with the ticket office closing an hour before the galleries and the top-floor halls beginning to close earlier still. A full-price ticket to the permanent exhibition costs 5,800 forints, with a 50 percent concession on proof of eligibility and a 9,000-forint annual ticket for repeat visitors; entry is free for everyone on Hungary's three national holidays. Reaching the museum means climbing Castle Hill one way or another: the Castle Hill Funicular runs from Adam Clark Square at the Buda end of the Chain Bridge directly to Szent Gyorgy ter at the museum's door, or bus 16 connects from Deak Ferenc ter in Pest. Bags larger than a small shoulder bag have to go into the free ground-floor cloakroom or coin-return lockers, and photography is allowed everywhere for personal use short of flash, tripods and selfie sticks. Wheelchair access runs through Building B, with lifts serving the rest of the complex.

The pattern across independent 2026 reviews is consistent enough to be worth stating plainly: people come away impressed by the art and, often in the same visit, unhappy with how they were treated by staff. Reviewers single out the breadth of the Hungarian painting collection - medieval altarpieces, 19th-century landscape and history painting, Munkacsy and Szinyei Merse, and newly arrived international names including Monet, Manet, Gauguin, Pissarro, Bonnard and Toulouse-Lautrec - and the view from the Dome, generally rating the visit as worth two to three hours or more. Set against that, separate visitors writing in March, July and August 2026 describe reception and gallery staff as rude or excessively rigid: disputes over concession eligibility for EU residents, a coat that had to stay on in a warm gallery despite requests to remove it, and close, uncomfortable monitoring in the exhibition rooms all recur as specific, independently reported complaints rather than a single visitor's bad day. One visitor called the audio guide thin next to the size of the permanent collection; another, more of an outlier among the reviews read, thought the display sequencing was less coherent than at comparable national galleries elsewhere in Europe.

Visitors consistently rate the depth and presentation of the collection well above the experience of dealing with the museum's front-of-house staff and its rules on coats and bags, which draw repeated, specific complaints across independent reviews spread through 2026.