Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago is a museum and school of art on Michigan Avenue, beside Grant Park and facing Lake Michigan, in Chicago, United States. It is usually counted among the three leading art museums in the country, alongside the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Founded in 1879, it had George Armour as its first president. In 1893 it moved into a Renaissance-style building designed by the Boston firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, which had been erected for the World's Columbian Exposition held that same year. Much of its holdings came from gifts by wealthy families to the city.

Its reputation rests above all on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, where it holds one of the world's most important permanent collections. It owns more than thirty paintings by Claude Monet, including several from the Haystacks series, along with works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Seurat, Gustave Caillebotte and Vincent van Gogh, among them his bedroom at Arles. Among older paintings, El Greco stands out with The Assumption of the Virgin, the first of his canvases to enter an American museum, and Francisco de Zurbarán with his Crucified Christ. In American art, Grant Wood's American Gothic and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, regarded as Hopper's masterpiece, are the best known.

The museum also holds sculpture, period room miniatures, furniture, photography and pre-Columbian ceramics. Its western entrance, flanked by two bronze lions, leads to a partial reconstruction of the old Chicago Stock Exchange trading room, designed by Louis Sullivan and demolished in 1972.