Unspecified/General

In the heart of Balboa Park's Plaza de Panama just east of downtown San Diego, the San Diego Museum of Art occupies one of the most architecturally distinctive museum buildings on the West Coast. The museum opened in February 1926 as the Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego in a striking Spanish Plateresque Revival building designed by William Templeton Johnson, with the elegant carved limestone facade modelled on the celebrated University of Salamanca in Spain and featuring detailed sculptural relief panels of three giants of Spanish painting, El Greco, Velazquez and Murillo, alongside ornate Spanish-Renaissance ornament throughout the facade. The museum's permanent collection comprises some 22,000 individual works spanning nearly seven thousand years of art history, with several internationally significant individual collections. The Spanish and Italian Renaissance galleries are widely considered one of the finest such collections on the West Coast outside the major Los Angeles and San Francisco institutions, with significant works by El Greco, Veronese, Tintoretto, Giorgione and the great Spanish masters Murillo, Ribera and Zurbaran. The South Asian galleries are particularly strong, with one of the most important collections of Indian, Tibetan and Nepalese art in the western United States including a notable assemblage of Mughal-era Indian miniature paintings. The East Asian galleries feature significant Chinese ceramics and bronzes alongside an extensive collection of Japanese Edo-era woodblock prints and screen paintings. The American galleries include significant nineteenth and twentieth-century paintings, with a particularly strong showing of California regional painters including the celebrated San Diego artists Charles Reiffel, Maurice Braun and Alfred Mitchell. The European nineteenth and twentieth-century galleries cover the major modern movements, with works by Monet, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Matisse and several minor pieces by Vincent van Gogh. The museum's outdoor May S. Marcy Sculpture Garden showcases significant outdoor sculpture by Henry Moore, Joan Miro and other twentieth-century masters. Modestly priced, with the surrounding cluster of Balboa Park museums easily added through combination passes.

Type: Tourist Attraction

Address: 1450 El Prado, San Diego, CA, United States

Telephone: 619-232-7931

Website: sdmart.org

Opening Date: 28/02/1926