Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Canada's oldest art museum, spread across five linked pavilions on Sherbrooke Street West.
The museum grew out of the Art Association of Montreal, founded in 1860, making it the oldest art museum in Canada. Its Sherbrooke Street home opened in 1912 in a Beaux-Arts building of white Vermont marble designed by the brothers Edward and William Sutherland Maxwell, with a portico of Ionic columns. Successive expansions turned the institution into a campus of five interconnected pavilions that straddle the street, linked by underground galleries and served by a single ticketing hall.
The Jean-Noel Desmarais Pavilion, completed in 1991 to a design by Moshe Safdie, added a stepped facade of Vermont marble on the south side of Sherbrooke Street. The Claire and Marc Bourgie Pavilion opened in 2011 inside the former Erskine and American Church, retaining a celebrated group of Tiffany stained-glass windows and incorporating Bourgie Hall, a chamber concert venue. The permanent collection numbers some 47,000 works, spanning archaeology, Quebec and Canadian art, international art, Indigenous art and decorative arts and design.
Highlights
- Five linked pavilions on both sides of Sherbrooke Street West
- Tiffany stained-glass windows in the Bourgie Pavilion church
- Quebec and Canadian art collection from the 18th century onwards
- Bourgie Hall, a 444-seat chamber music venue inside the museum
