Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum

The Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum is a picture gallery in Madrid, Spain, that brings together European and American painting, from the early Italian and Flemish masters to twentieth-century modern art. Its origins lie in the private collection that the Thyssen-Bornemisza family assembled in Switzerland over roughly six decades. The Spanish State acquired the core of that collection in 1993, after a leasing agreement signed in 1988. Because it holds many foreign masters absent from the national museums, it works as a complement to the Prado and the Reina Sofía. Its range is broad, running from the Renaissance of Ghirlandaio and Carpaccio to the Venetian view painting of Canaletto, the Impressionism of Van Gogh, the German Expressionism of Kirchner and Beckmann, and the Russian avant-garde of Kandinsky. Among its best-known works are Caravaggio's Saint Catherine of Alexandria, Albrecht Dürer's Christ among the Doctors, Edward Hopper's Girl Sewing by a Machine and Goya's El tío Paquete.

The museum occupies the Villahermosa Palace, an eighteenth-century neoclassical building that was once one of Madrid's most prestigious mansions and later served as a bank headquarters before being remodelled by Rafael Moneo as a picture gallery. It opened on 8 October 1992. In 2004 it extended its premises with two adjoining buildings, which allowed it to display some 240 further paintings. Part of its collection is also shown at the National Art Museum of Catalonia in Barcelona, where the early Italian painters and the Baroque have a prominent place.

The museum forms part of the so-called Triangle of Art on the Paseo del Prado, the area that gathers Spain's most important painting heritage. Visitor numbers recovered after the pandemic, with more than 1,070,000 visits in 2022.