Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago is an encyclopedic art museum founded in 1879 as both a museum and school for the fine arts. The museum's permanent collection covers nearly 5,000 years of art from around the world, and has grown to nearly 300,000 works, including a collection of Impressionist and post-impressionist pieces. 

Housed in a Beaux-Arts style building originally built for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, collections include over 1,000 contemporary works from 1945 to the present, nearly 1,000 works of modern art by artists from Europe and the Americas, more than 3,500 European paintings from the 12th through the 20th century, and five millennia of Asian art.