J. Paul Getty Museum

The J. Paul Getty Museum is a privately founded art museum in Los Angeles, California, in the United States. It takes its name from J. Paul Getty, an oil industry magnate who opened a lavish palace in Pacific Palisades, near Malibu, as a museum in 1974. The building was a re-creation of the Villa of the Papyri in ancient Herculaneum, a Roman town destroyed by an eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

In 1997 the museum moved most of its holdings to the Getty Center, built in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles at a cost of one billion dollars. The original site was renamed the Getty Villa and dedicated to Greek and Roman art; it was remodeled in 2006. The Getty Center houses the remaining collections, along with research centers, a lecture hall and the headquarters of the J. Paul Getty Trust, the foundation that runs the museum and other activities, including research and conservation projects in several countries.

The collections span works from antiquity to the twentieth century, and the museum receives about 1,300,000 visitors a year, which places it among the most visited museums in the United States. Among its paintings are Irises by Vincent van Gogh, Spring by Édouard Manet, The Rape of Europa by Rembrandt and Starry Night by Edvard Munch. The artists most represented on its website include Rembrandt, Joaquín Sorolla, Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne, followed by Titian and Jacques-Louis David.