Soaring glass vision with comprehensive holdings
The Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) is among North America's largest and most distinguished art museums. Its encyclopaedic collection of more than 120,000 works of art ranges from the 1st century to present day, and includes a number of works from Canadian, First Nations, Inuit, African, European and Oceanic artists. The museum hosts a significant collection of European art from the 11th through 20th centuries, and it is especially strong in 17th-century Dutch painting, 17th-century Italian painting and sculpture and 19th-century French salon and impressionist painting. Peter Paul Rubens’s “Massacre of the Innocents” (1611) is a major highlight, and when it was purchased in 2002 by Ken Thomson, it broke the record for the most expensive Old Master work sold at auction. The AGO has a strong collection of modern art, including works by Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, Barbara Hepworth, Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet. It also holds the largest public collection of works by the English sculptor Henry Moore, most of which were donated by the artist in 1974 and are now displayed in a dedicated sculpture center. An extensive group of works highlights Canadian artmaking, with a strong emphasis on artists from Toronto and Ontario, and features one of the premier collections of work by Tom Thomson, the Group of Seven and their contemporaries. The collection also includes works from the First Peoples of North America, namely First Nations, Inuit and Metis — reflecting one of the museum’s primary collecting goals. The museum’s African collection, exhibited in a permanent gallery on the second floor, includes 95 artworks primarily from the 19th-century Sahara. In addition to the permanent collection, the AGO mounts an ambitious and wide-ranging exhibition program that has spotlighted artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, JMW Turner, Yayoi Kusama, Mickalene Thomas and Vija Celmins, among many others. Each year the museum sponsors an artist-in-residence program, which invites artists to the museum and supports their practice and development as they create new work. The eye-catching main building has undergone a number of expansions since opening to the public in 1918. In the 2000s Frank Gehry was commissioned to expand and unite the various developments, notably adding a glass and wood projecting canopy known as the "Galleria Italia.”
Read LessCollection Highlights
Sea Captain Figure, c.1840
