Best Art Museums in Madrid
- Will Gerson
- Mar 24
- 3 min read
Madrid is an art lover’s paradise, with an impressive array of museums showcasing works by a wide range of Spanish and other European artists both old and new.
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Museo del Prado
Madrid’s crown jewel of art museums is the Prado, located along the tree-lined Paseo del Prado just steps from the Parque del Retiro. The museum houses the royal collection of art acquired by the Habsburgs and later the Bourbons who ruled Spain from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The Prado holds the world’s largest collection of works by the three grandes maestros of Spanish painting––El Greco, Diego Velázquez, and Francisco de Goya––as well as numerous works by other celebrated painters like the Dutchmen Peter Paul Rubens and Hieronymous Bosch and the Italians Titian and Raphael. In fact, the Prado has one of the largest collections of Italian Renaissance art outside of Italy, thanks in large part to Velázquez, who during his time as the royal court’s painter convinced his patron Felipe IV to acquire these works.
Many of the most famous works of classical Spanish painting can be found on the walls of the museum, such as El Greco’s El caballero de la mano en el pecho, Velázquez’s Las meninas (one of the most important works in Western art), and Goya’s La maja desnuda / vestida and El 3 de mayo en Madrid, as well as his arresting and strikingly modern Pinturas negras (Black Paintings), painted as murals on the walls of his house while the artist neared the end of his life.
Museo Reina Sofía
Take a pleasant stroll down the Paseo del Prado, past the Real Jardín Botánico and the Atocha train station, and you will arrive at the Reina Sofía, Spain’s national museum of twentieth-century art. This was arguably Spain’s most influential century of visual art, producing world-renowned artists like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró. The museum holds a large collection of works by these three artists, as well as works by other painters from Spain, such as the underappreciated cubist Juan Gris, and from the rest of Europe.
Without a doubt, the collection’s most important piece is Picasso’s Guernica, one of the artist’s most famous works, which depicts the bombing of the town of Guernica, in Spain’s Basque Country, by the Nazi German and Italian air forces, who were allies of Francisco Franco’s Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. The massive canvas, which measures more around eleven and a half feet tall and twenty-five and a half feet wide (3.5m x 7.75m), occupies its own wall on the museum’s second floor, and you should take your time to appreciate and contemplate the painting in all its grandeur. The museum also has numerous large exhibition spaces and is one of the world’s largest museums of modern and contemporary art.
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
Just opposite from the Prado, on the other side of the Fuente de Neptuno, the Thyssen rounds out the city’s ‘golden triangle’ of world-class art museums.
The Thyssen’s collection fills some of the holes that are missing in the works displayed at the Prado and the Reina Sofía, with a particular emphasis on the early Italian Renaissance as well as the Impressionist movement. The collection includes work by artists as varied as Caravaggio, Monet, van Gogh, and Edward Hopper.
Museo Sorolla
Tucked away in the affluent northern district of Chamberí, the Museo Sorolla is one of the hidden gems of Madrid’s museum circuit. The museum is dedicated to the work of Joaquín Sorolla, a Spanish painter who developed his own unique variant of Impressionism, and is located in the house where the artist lived and worked. The charming house and its tranquil garden offer a slice of serenity in the middle of the city.
