Ticket from Netherlands

Van Gogh Museum
Paulus Potterstraat 7 1071 CX Amsterdam, Nederland 
+31 20 570 5200
 vangoghmuseum.nl‎

The museum is founded in 1973 and located in a building designed by Gerrit Rietveld. The museum's collection is the largest collection of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings in the world. In 2012, the museum had an estimated 1,475,800 visitors, which makes it the most visited museum in the Netherlands and the 31st most visited art museumworldwide.

Ticket from France

Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a museum of the decorative arts and design, 107 rue de Rivoli, Paris 1er, France. It is part of Les Arts Décoratifs.



Located in the Louvre museum's western wing, known as the Pavillon de Marsan, the museum was founded in 1905 by members of the Union des Arts Décoratifs. It houses and displays furniture, interior design, altar pieces, religious paintings, objets d'arts, tapestries, wallpaper, ceramics and glassware, plus toys from the Middle Ages to the present day.

The collection is primarily composed of French furniture, tableware, carpets such as those from Aubusson, porcelain such as that by the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, and a large number of pieces of glass by René Lalique, Émile Gallé and numerous others. And there are modern examples by designers like Eileen Gray, Charlotte Perriand, and those of the Art Nouveau and Art Déco styles. However, the deep holdings range back to the 13th century when Europe became the capital of culture in the Western world.

Of interest to the public are the period rooms. Examples include part of Jeanne Lanvin's house (decorated by Albert-Armand Rateau (1884–1938) in the early 1920s) at 16 rue Barbet-de-Jouy in Paris. Others are graphic artist Eugène Grasset's dining room of 1880, and the 1752 Gold Cabinet of Avignon. And, peculiar to a French museum it seems, there is the 1875 bedroom of courtesan Lucie Émilie Delabigne, purportedly the inspiration for the main character in Émile Zola's novel Nana (1880).

There is a famous ceiling there once owned by the famous Jeanne Baptiste d'Albert de Luynes, mistress of the then duke of Savoy.

Some of the museum's vast number of exhibitions has been distinguished. Yvonne Brunhammer, a curator and then director of the museum for over four decades from the early 1950s and the person who rediscovered Eileen Gray, organized the 1966 exhibition, "Les Années '25': Art Déco/Bauhaus/Stijl Esprit Nouveau". The exhibition served to coin "Art Déco", the term that came to describe design between the World Wars, particularly French modern design.

The museum is somewhat on a par with similar and venerable decorative-arts and design-focused institutions such as the more international Victoria and Albert Museum in London and was the inspiration for the Hewitt sisters' collection in the Cooper Union (the ancestor of the no-longer-affiliated Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum) in New York City. However, due to the large number of fine-art exhibitions mounted at the Paris museum, its focus has been diluted and caused its name—Musée des "Art Decoratifs"—to be a misnomer.

wikipedia
Website for Musée des Arts Décoratifs

The State Hermitage. Ticket from Russia

The State Hermitage is a museum of art and culture situated in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One of the largest and oldest museums of the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and open to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display, comprise nearly 3 million items, including the largest collection of paintings in the world. The collections occupy a large complex of six historic buildings along Palace Embankment, including the Winter Palace, a former residence of Russian emperors. Apart from them, the Menshikov Palace, Museum of Porcelain, Storage Facility at Staraya Derevnya and the eastern wing of the General Staff Building also make part of the museum. The museum has several exhibition centers abroad. The Hermitage is a federal state property. Since 1990, the director of the museum has been Mikhail Piotrovsky.

Out of six buildings of the main museum complex, four, namely the Winter Palace, Small Hermitage, Old Hermitage and New Hermitage, are partially open to the public. The other two are Hermitage Theatre and the Reserve House. The entrance ticket for foreign tourists costs several times as much as the fee paid by Russian citizens. However, the entrance is free of charge first Thursday of every month for all visitors and daily for students and children. The museum is closed on Mondays. Entrance is in the Winter Palace from Palace Embankment or the Courtyard.

hermitagemuseum.org
Hermitage_Museum