Visiting : Accessibility : Outreach

Highlights of the Collection
Available Year-Round
The Museum's vast collection of fine and applied arts from Asia, Europe, and the United States is highlighted through this digitally illustrated lecture program. Spanning over 2,000 years, the collections include masterpieces of painting, sculpture, prints, and drawings displayed with a wide range of furniture, silver, glasswork, architectural elements, and entire furnished period rooms from historic houses.

20th Century Painting and Sculpture
Available Year-Round
The Museum’s superb collection of modern and contemporary art is among the most distinguished in the world. Highlights include an extraordinary concentration of work by artistic giants such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Henri Matisse, as well as American Modernists like Georgia O’Keeffe. The expanding contemporary collections include major works by Jasper Johns and Sol LeWitt, along with younger artists who are breaking new ground today.

The American Collection
Available Year-Round
The history of the United States is brought to life through the Museum’s American collections, which survey three centuries of paintings, furniture, sculpture, and decorative arts with a special emphasis on Philadelphia’s rich traditions. The collections include important portraits, landscapes, and figure paintings by eighteenth and nineteenth-century masters, including the country’s finest group of work by Philadelphia’s Thomas Eakins.

An Eakins Masterpiece Restored: Seeing The Gross Clinic Anew
Available Year-Round
Acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2007 after a stirring public campaign to keep the painting in Philadelphia, Thomas Eakins’ masterpiece, Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic) of 1875, has been cleaned and restored for the first time in almost fifty years. The painting emerges from the conservation studio as the centerpiece of this exhibition, which throws new light on a work acclaimed as the greatest American painting of the nineteenth century.

Inviting visitors to see this celebrated painting afresh, the exhibition first evokes the experience of The Gross Clinic in Eakins’s own day. Aiming to make an international impression at the Centennial Exhibition, which took place in Philadelphia in 1876, the young and ambitious Eakins (1844–1916) prepared a monumental modern history painting celebrating the nation’s most famous surgeon, Dr. Samuel Gross of Jefferson Medical College (now part of Thomas Jefferson University). Rejected by the jury as too gruesome for the art galleries, however, the picture was installed among the medical displays of the U. S. Army model post hospital.

Eakins’s preparatory studies for the painting, X-radiographs of the canvas, historical images of The Gross Clinic, and a video documentary help visitors understand how the painting was made, how it looked in 1875, and how and why it has changed over time.

Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus
Available through October 30, 2011
Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) is universally acclaimed as the greatest master painter of the Dutch Golden Age, the 17th-century efflorescence of art in the Netherlands. Thanks to an inventory of his home and studio conducted in July 1656, we know that Rembrandt kept in his bedroom two of his own paintings called Head of Christ. A third painting—identified as a "Head of Christ, from life"—was found in a bin in Rembrandt's studio, awaiting use as a model for a New Testament composition. Today, seven paintings survive (from what was likely eight originally) that fit this description, all painted by Rembrandt and his pupils between 1643 and 1655. Bust-length portraits, they show the same young man familiar from traditional artistic conceptions of Christ, yet each figure also bears a slightly different expression. In posing an ethnographically correct model and using a human face to depict Jesus, Rembrandt overturned the entire history of Christian art, which had previously relied on rigidly copied prototypes for Christ.

This exhibition, the first Rembrandt exhibition in Philadelphia since 1932 and the first ever in the city to include paintings by the Dutch master, reunites the seven paintings of this exceedingly rare and singular series for the first time since 1656. Of these portraits, three are being seen in the United States for the first time. Complemented by more than fifty related paintings, prints, and drawings, Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus allows visitors to consider the religious, historic, and artistic significance of these works. Objects of private reflection for Rembrandt, the paintings in this exhibition bear witness to Rembrandt's iconoclasm and his search for a meditative ideal.

In addition to major paintings, many of the selected drawings in this exhibition have been rarely exhibited or lent owing to their light-sensitivity and fragility. Indeed, never before have so many of Rembrandt’s finest paintings, etchings, and drawings that depict Jesus Christ and events of his life been assembled for an exhibition.

Fairmount Park Houses
Available Year-Round
This digitally illustrated lecture on the historic Fairmount Park Houses offers unique glimpses into early Philadelphia. Through these brilliantly preserved mansions, observe architectural and decorative styles of the day and learn more about the lives of prominent Philadelphians in colonial times. The lecture includes Mount Pleasant, Cedar Grove, Woodford Mansion, Lemon Hill, Sweetbriar, Strawberry Mansion, and Laurel Hill.

The Perelman Building
Available Year-Round
With its gleaming rows of windows, bright interior, and twin cathedral-like entrances, the landmark Art Deco building on Fairmount and Pennsylvania avenues was called "the Gateway to Fairmount Park" when it opened in 1927 as the headquarters for the Fidelity Mutual Life Insurance Company. It has now been dramatically recast in a new role as the gateway to the future for the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Set within a lively urban neighborhood, commanding a spectacular view of Fairmount Park, and just across the street from the Museum's main building, the new galleries and study centers showcase some of the Museum's most comprehensive, colorful, and cutting-edge collections.

The Waterworks
Available Year-Round
Philadelphia was the first city in the Colonies to regard the consistent delivery of safe drinking water to its citizens as a municipal responsibility. It named a Watering Committee in the late 1700’s which eventually had the Water Works built on the eastern banks of the Schuylkill River. Learn about the history of the Water Works - its many lives (including how the Art Museum came to be built on top of the old reservoir), its almost demise, and its revitalization.