Art Institute of Chicago

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Art Institute of Chicago is a world-class art museum and a famous, independent school of fine arts. It was founded in 1866 and from 1868 became an arts high school in Chicago, Illinois. Institute of Arts was born as a result of the city's wealthiest citizens' initiative, which donated funds and their collections of paintings, among these there are Arthur Jerome Eddy, Bertha Honoré Palmer and Martin Antoine Ryerson.

The first building of the institute was located on South Michigan Avenue and was designed by the architects Shepley, Rutan and Coolide –here took place in 1893 an international exhibition, the World Columbian Exposition. Now the Institute is located in Grant Park, the Historic Michigan Boulevard District. Extending on approximatively one million square feet, Art Institute of Chicago is the second largest art museum in the United States, being surpassed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In the museum there are preserved more than 300,000 works of art that date from a period of five centuries. It has one of the world's most notable collections of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, along with American art, Old Master's, European and American decorative arts, Asian art and modern and contemporary art.

The museum is renowned for its collection of Impressionist and American paintings, among which the most important are Claude Monet's Haystacks, Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Grant Wood's American Gothic and Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.

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