J. Paul Getty Museum
The fabulous Getty Museum has two outstanding
locations in the Los Angeles area, one at the Pacific Palisades
that is located in the Getty Villa, and the other, the Getty
Center is in Los Angeles, welcoming over 1.3 million visitors
every year, which makes it one of the most visited and popular
art museums in the nation. The center houses exceptional works
from Western art from the Middle Ages to the current day, while
the Getty Villa houses artworks from the ancient period of
Etruria, Rome and Greece. Getty would open his second museum in
1974, to be placed in a replicated villa of the Villa of the
Papyri at Herculaneum, that he had constructed on his Pacific
Palisades property, and in 1982, it would become the richest
museum in the world when it would inherit 1.2 billion dollars.
It moved to its present locale in Brentwood, while the Palisades
museum would be renamed the Getty Villa. The center that is
situated in Brentwood has grown into a campus for cultural
institutions that had been started by the oilman, J. Paul Getty,
and the $1.3 billion center opened in 1997, high atop a hill,
specializing in pre-20th century European decorative arts,
paintings, sculpture, drawings, illuminated manuscripts and 19th
and 20th century American and European photographs. One of the
most significant paintings held by the museum is Irises by
Vincent van Gogh, with a beautiful central garden, 2 million
photographs about architecture and art and a research library of
more than 900,000 volumes. Other magnificent paintings include;
Portrait of a Halberdier by Pontormo from the early 16th
century, and a copy of a Portrait of Louis XIV that came from
the workshop of Hyacinthe Riguard from 1701. His amazing
photograph collection houses 35,000 prints, 475 albums that
contain 40,000 mounted prints, 1500 daguerreotypes and other
cased items and 30,000 stereographs and cartes-de-viste.
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