Museum of Fine Arts of Saint Petersburg is located at:

255 Beach Drive Northeast
St. Petersburg, FL
Voice: 727-896-2667

The Permanent Collection

The permanent collection of more than 4,000 works at the St. Petersburg's Museum of Fine Arts is the only comprehensive art collection, extending from antiquity to the present day, on the Florida west coast. The collection is particularly strong in eighteenth and nineteenth-century European painting, including French Impressionism, and nineteenth and early twentieth-century American art. The Museum's photography collection of more than 1,100 works is considered one of the finest in the Southeast.

Among the French artists represented in the collection are: Fragonard, Robert, Daumier, Carot, Gerome, Cezanne, Monet, Morisot, Gauguin, Renoir, Rodin, and Picabia. American artists with work in the collection include: Thomas Moran, Whistler, Homer, Inness, Prendergast, Bellows, Henri, Luks, O'Keeffe, Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Frank Stella, and Lichtenstein. The photography holdings feature works by Fox Talbot, Steichen, Weston, Adams, Cartier-Bresson, Siskind, Strand, Avedon, and Arbus. Also on view are ancient Greek and Roman, pre-Columbian, Asian, African, American Indian, and decorative arts, including a gallery of Steuben Glass.

The Museum of Fine Arts frequently loans its works to museums in Florida, where it is a particularly important resource. The state has few comprehensive art collections and works are often requested by museums throughout this country and abroad. The Museum's collection also serves as a resource for scholars around the world. For example, the Cezanne on view at the Museum -- Oxen Hill at the Hermitage, Pontoise, c.1877 -- is analyzed extensively in the book by Dr. Barbara Ehrlich White, Impressionists Side by Side - Their Friendships, Rivalries, and Artistic Exchanges (Alfred A. Knopf).  The painting, also known as Un Coin de bois (A Corner of the Woods) is reproduced in color and compared to Pissaro's Oxen Hill painting completed in the same year. The Museum's painting by Jacques-Emile Blanche, Contemplation, 1863, was featured on the cover of Apollo: The International Magazine of the Arts, published in London.

The Building

The elegant Palladian-style building is an area landmark. It combines the styles of a classic art museum and a Mediterranean villa at home in Florida's tropical climate. Designed by John Volk, the building, itself a work of art, has twenty galleries, some small and intimate, others more spacious. Some are carpeted; others have parquet floors.

Norma Roberts writes this about the interior in the Catalogue of the Collection: "From a twenty-four-foot high ceiling inside the entrance hangs a 1790 Irish Waterford chandelier. Beyond the entrance is the Great Hall, a grand lobby and reception area, also with a twenty-four-foot high ceiling. The Jacobean Room, originally part of a Staffordshire manor house built around 1610, is furnished with carved oak furniture, fine pewter, and seventeenth-century prints by such masters as Durer and Rembrandt. The elegant and fashionable Georgian Room from about 1740, a charming parlor believed to have come from the Bulls Inn in London, contains a carved mantelpiece and two Queen Anne corner cabinets of great refinement." The Museum also has slendid Membership and Sculpture Gardens and the striking Marly Room, a lecture and performing arts hall that seats 225 people.

Hours and Admission

Hours are from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. on Sunday. For more information, please call 727-896-2667