Philadelphia Museum of Art

The museum's real depth is encyclopedic breadth rather than any single hoard. It holds Old Master, Impressionist and Post-Impressionist European painting alongside what it calls the most complete collection of Thomas Eakins anywhere, one of the largest arms and armor holdings in the United States, entire imported rooms and religious architecture from Asia and Europe rather than reconstructions of them, and a modern and contemporary collection built from two of the twentieth century's most consequential private gifts, the Arensberg and Gallatin collections.

The building most visitors picture when they say the Philadelphia Museum of Art is a Greek Revival temple raised on Fairmount, the rocky hill that gives the neighborhood its name, at the head of Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Two architectural firms, Horace Trumbauer's office and Zantzinger, Borie and Medary, spent more than a decade working out whether Philadelphia should build one museum or several before construction began in 1919. Two architects inside Trumbauer's firm did the real design work: Howell Lewis Shay planned the building's massing, and Julian Abele, the first African American graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's architecture program, drew the classical details and chose the color of both the dolomite stone and the painted figures on the roofline. Wartime shortages delayed the building so badly that the first twenty galleries did not open until March 1928, with much of the interior still unfinished. Of the eight pediments planned for sculpture, only one was ever completed: Western Civilization, a set of painted terracotta figures by C. Paul Jennewein colored by Leon V. Solon, which won an architectural medal in 1933. The bronze griffins that line the roof became the museum's own symbol decades later, in the 1970s.

The institution began nowhere near the parkway. It was chartered in 1876 to hold onto what the Centennial Exposition had proved that year: that Philadelphia could stage a world's fair. The art on show went into Memorial Hall, and in 1877 a companion school opened to train working craftsmen in drawing, design and modeling, becoming independent in 1964 and eventually part of the University of the Arts. Admission was charged at first, dropped in 1881, and stayed free until 1962. The nineteenth-century collection grew through gifts rather than purchase: Clara Jessup Moore's antique furniture, enamels and ivories from 1882, the Countess de Brazza's lace from 1894, and, most consequentially, Anna H. Wilstach's 1892 bequest of paintings and a half-million-dollar acquisition fund that bought works by James Abbott McNeill Whistler and George Inness within a few years. None of this collection moved into the Fairmount building until decades after it was chartered; the museum people visit today is a twentieth-century building holding a nineteenth-century founding gift.

Inside, the museum organizes itself less like a single building than a set of departments, each with its own centuries. The Asian galleries pair Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Persian and Indian ceramics, carpets, paintings and sculpture with imported architecture: a real ceremonial tea house, a Chinese palace reception hall, and a South Indian temple hall, rather than reproductions of any of them. The European galleries run from medieval church portals and a Dutch tavern room through Impressionism and Post-Impressionism to Auguste Rodin's sculpture, still shown here in the Main Building in addition to the dedicated Rodin Museum a short walk down the parkway, which is a separate institution the museum also administers. The American department holds what the museum calls the most complete collection of Thomas Eakins anywhere, alongside Pennsylvania German folk art and Philadelphia federal-era furniture and silver. Modern and contemporary art fills the underground galleries added in the 2010s, and more than 150,000 prints, drawings and photographs, along with the costume and textile collection, are ordinarily shown at the museum's Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building across Pennsylvania Avenue, which the museum's own website listed as closed until further notice as of August 2026, alongside its two historic houses in Fairmount Park.

The museum's modern art department exists largely because of two private collectors rather than any museum-led buying program. Louise and Walter Arensberg's gift brought Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, ridiculed at the 1913 Armory Show in New York and now one of the most recognizable paintings in the building. A.E. Gallatin's gift brought Pablo Picasso's Three Musicians and early Mondrian abstractions among other things. Duchamp himself has a second, stranger presence here: Etant donnes, his secret final work, built in private over two decades and revealed to the public only through a pair of peepholes drilled into an old wooden door. Anne d'Harnoncourt, then a young curator and later the museum's longest-serving director, arranged its acquisition, and Duchamp's widow Alexina and stepson Paul Matisse installed it themselves in 1969, a year after his death and exactly as his instructions specified. A different kind of gift sits nearby in costume and textiles: Grace Kelly, born in Philadelphia, gave the museum her own 1956 wedding dress not long after marrying Prince Rainier III of Monaco, and it remains one of the most requested objects in the building.

By the mid-2000s the museum had run out of room without wanting to touch its Greek Revival facade, so in October 2006 it announced that Frank Gehry would design an expansion entirely underground, behind the east entrance stairs, adding tens of thousands of square feet of new gallery space without changing the building's outward appearance. The project slowed after director Anne d'Harnoncourt's death in 2008 and proceeded in phases under her successors, reopening the long-closed south street-level entrance in 2012 and completing its main phase, marketed as the Core Project, on 7 May 2021. Critics were, on the whole, generous: the Philadelphia Inquirer praised its restraint, the Wall Street Journal called it impressive, and the New York Times called the result substantial, largely because Gehry deliberately avoided his own signature swooping forms in favor of a design that deferred to Trumbauer and Abele's original building. Not every review was uncomplicated praise. The critic John Haber, writing on his own site shortly after the reopening, judged the new underground contemporary galleries safe rather than genuinely edgy, and questioned whether the museum's reconstructed period rooms present real history or only its appearance. The most contested single design element, a proposed window and amphitheater cut into the east entrance stairs, drew criticism from people who found it both too disruptive, and, from others, too tame.

A museum with a collection this large is also, inevitably, a party to a great deal of ownership history, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art does not always come out of that history clean. In 2000, working from the Kienbusch armor collection's own published catalogs, the state art collections in Dresden identified five pieces that had been stolen from Germany during the Second World War, unknowingly bought by the collector in 1953, and the museum agreed to return them. A newer claim remains open: in December 2021, heirs of Piet Mondrian sued the museum for Composition with Blue, a 1926 painting that entered the collection through the A.E. Gallatin gift, arguing it was seized from a German museum as officially disfavored art in 1938 and passed through a New York gallery with a documented history of handling Nazi-seized work before Gallatin bought it in 1939; the claim was still unresolved in the reporting read for this page. The institution has also spent the past year in open crisis over its own leadership: director Sasha Suda was dismissed in November 2025 after an investigation the museum says found she awarded herself unauthorized pay increases, and Suda sued in response, calling the dismissal retaliation by a board faction resistant to change. The museum itself changed its public name to Philadelphia Art Museum in October 2025 and reversed the decision back to Philadelphia Museum of Art in February 2026, a reversal that landed in the middle of the Suda dispute rather than apart from it.

Plan around the museum's unusual closing pattern before anything else: the Main Building is dark both Tuesday and Wednesday, rather than the single weekday most museums choose, and open late on Friday evening until 8:45pm. General admission needs no advance booking, though the museum encourages buying online ahead for ticketed special exhibitions. Admission is free for anyone eighteen and under every day, free for active-duty military and their entire party from Armed Forces Day through Labor Day, and Pay What You Wish on the first Sunday of every month. The Main Building is only part of the campus: the Rodin Museum, a separate institution the same organization administers, sits further down the parkway and is not covered by this page; the Anne d'Harnoncourt Sculpture Garden sits just outside; and the Perelman Building and the two historic houses, Cedar Grove and Mount Pleasant, were all listed as closed until further notice on the museum's own website as of August 2026. None of that touches the one detail every visitor already half-expects: the steps up to the north or east entrance are the same steps Sylvester Stallone ran up in eight Rocky films, a bronze statue of the character stands at their base rather than their top after decades of relocation disputes, and climbing them remains free, year-round, with or without a ticket to anything inside.

Visitors consistently treat this as a full-day, sometimes overwhelming museum rather than a quick stop: praise clusters around the sheer range of the encyclopedic collection, the grandeur of the Greek Revival building and its steps, and the value of free admission for anyone eighteen and under, while the recurring complaint is less about the art than about logistics, chiefly the museum's unusual two-day closure and the crowding around headline special exhibitions.