8 Kolobrzeska, Bydgoszcz, Poland
The National Museum is situated at 3 Aleje Jerozolimskie Street in a Modernist building, erected in 1927-1938 (the east wing of the building is a headquarters of the Polish Army Museum). It is one of the biggest art museums in Poland and the biggest one in Warsaw. The exhibits of the museum include over 830 000 pieces of Polish and international art. Visitors will find here ancient pieces of art (Egyptian, Greek, Roman), Polish paintings from the 13th century up till current times, international paintings (Russian, German, Dutch, French, Italian), arts and crafts exhibits and numismatic collections. The National Museum is a must see site in Warsaw to experience original, extraordinary pieces of art that we know only from textbooks.
The National Museum in Warsaw is an art museum established in 1862 as the Museum of Fine Arts in Warsaw. It is also a national cultural institution and one of the largest museums in Poland.
Until 1916, it was located in one building with the School of Fine Arts. The base of the museum's collections were oil paintings from the collection of the aforementioned school as well as drawings belonging to the Government Library and the School of Fine Arts.
The National Museum in Warsaw collects collections of ancient art (Egyptian, Greek, Roman), Polish painting from the 13th century, as well as a gallery of foreign paintings (Italian, French, Dutch, German and Russian). There are also several paintings from the private collections of Adolf Hitler, which were donated by the American authorities. There are also numismatic and handicraft collections.
The National Museum in Warsaw presents seven permanent galleries: Faras, Medieval Art, Old European Painting, the Gallery of 19th Century Art, 20th and 21st Century Art, Decorative Art and the Gallery of Ancient Art. The exhibitions are arranged in such a way as to make viewers aware that all creative periods in history are interconnected and merge into one universal panorama of art and culture. The National Museum in Warsaw also offers visitors many temporary exhibitions.
The National Museum in Warsaw also has four other departments: the Poster Museum in Wilanów, the Sculpture Museum. Xawery Dunikowski in Królikarnia, the Interior Museum in Otwock Wielki and the Museum in Nieborów and Arkadia.
The Faras Gallery is the only exhibition of monuments of Nubian culture and art from the Christian period in Europe and unique in the world. The relics found their way to the museum collections thanks to the Polish archaeological mission, which in the 1960s participated in the action to save the remains of the ancient cultures of the Nile Valley. The expedition was under the patronage of UNESCO. The gallery presents a unique collection of wall paintings dating from the 8th to the 14th century, from the cathedral in Faras in Sudan, depicting divine and saints as well as Nubian dignitaries, clergy and lay people, as well as architectural details of the cathedral, inscriptions, a set of clay vessels with Faras and Old Dongola, and a collection of fabrics and crosses from Ethiopia and the Carpathian region.
In the Medieval Art Gallery there are mainly objects from the late Middle Ages (14th – 16th centuries), from various regions of today's Poland, as well as several exhibits from Western Europe. Particularly noteworthy are: the polyptych of the Dormition and Coronation of Mary (ca.1390) from the castle chapel in Grudziądz, Pieta from Lubiąż (ca.1370), the Wrocław polyptych of St. Barbara (around 1447), the sculpture Beautiful Madonna from Wrocław (1410), the outstanding painting of Pieta from Tubądzin (1450), the altar of the Holy Virgins of Nysa (after 1510). In the gallery you will also see impressive wing altars, sculptures adorning the so-called rainbow beams, pillars, as well as numerous smaller objects: liturgical equipment, altars, paintings and sculptures intended for private prayer.
The Old Art Gallery was established from the former Gallery of Decorative Art, the Gallery of Old European Painting and the Old Polish National Museum. The collection includes paintings, drawings, graphics and sculptures from the 16th to the beginning of the 20th century. The gallery juxtaposes various genres of art and shows the most important areas of social life in old Europe - court culture, religious culture and urban culture - arranging them into a coherent story about old epochs. The works of Sandra Botticelli, Giovanni Bellini, Jacob Jordaens, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Tintoretto, painters from Rembrandt's circle and Old Polish artists are accompanied by sculptural and drawing works as well as valuable decorative art objects, e.g. coat and coronation insignia of Augustus III.
The Gallery of 19th Century Art is one of the largest and most important exhibitions of Polish painting. You will see works by the most outstanding Polish artists: Olga Boznańska, Jan Matejka, Aleksander and Maksymilian Gierymski, Julian Fałat, Józef Chełmoński, Józef Mehoffer, Jacek Malczewski and many others. The Polish works are accompanied by selected works by French, German, Austrian, Russian, Dutch and Finnish artists. The exhibition reflects the richness and diversity of artistic trends, genres and attitudes in the nineteenth century, stylistic and thematic changes, national and cosmopolitan trends. At the beginning of 2022, the Photography Room will open at the exhibition.
The 20th and 21st Century Art Gallery at the National Museum in Warsaw is the capital's first permanent collection showing the panorama of Polish art of the last 100 years in the context of a turbulent and difficult history. It includes works in the field of painting, sculpture and spatial objects, drawing, graphics, as well as photography and visual techniques. The gallery shows the works of all the most outstanding artists, from Stanisław Wyspiański, Jacek Malczewski, Józef Mehoffer, Wojciech Weiss, through the works of Zbigniew Pronaszka, Zofia Stryjeńska, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Leon Chwistek, Jan Cybis, to Tadeusz Kantor, Maria Jarema, Jerzy Nowosielski Roman Opałka, Ryszard Winiarski, Andrzej Wróblewski, Wojciech Fangor, Łukasz Korolkiewicz, Ewa Kuryluk and many others.
The Gallery of Polish Decorative Art presents works of Polish decorative art from the 16th to the beginning of the 20th century in five rooms. In addition to goldsmiths in Gdańsk, Warsaw and other centers, the exhibition also includes embroidery, tapestries, robe belts and clothing, as well as eighteenth-century glass from the Nalibock, Urzecka and Lubaczów glassworks. The ceramics are represented by eighteenth-century faience from the Belvedere manufactory, porcelain factories in Korets and Baranówka, and artistic ceramics from the late nineteenth - early twentieth centuries.
The Ancient Art Gallery presents around 1,800 relics of the ancient civilizations of Egypt, the Middle East, Greece and Rome. The most interesting are, among others: the sarcophagus and cartonage of the priest Hor Djehuti with the mummy of an unknown woman, papyrus with the Book of the Dead written in hieroglyphs (almost 10 meters long), ritual blind gates from the mastaba of an Egyptian official named Izi or a portrait of a young boy probably from the oasis of Fayum (Egypt).
