Small and Quirky Museums Worth Seeking Out
The blockbuster institutions get most of the planning effort and most of the column inches. But some of the most rewarding museum experiences in the world happen in rooms that hold fewer than a hundred objects, in buildings that were never designed as museums, or in collections that began with a single individual's consuming obsession. These are institutions where intimacy is the point, where the curator is often within earshot, and where you are unlikely to find a busload of school children blocking the one painting you came to see.
Sir John Soane's Museum, London
Sir John Soane was one of the greatest British architects of the Regency period — he designed the original Bank of England building — and in the last decades of his life he transformed his three connected townhouses at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields into a museum of his own collection and a monument to his own architectural ideas. He arranged for an Act of Parliament in 1833 to preserve the house exactly as it stood after his death, and it has remained substantially unchanged since he died in 1837.
The result is one of the strangest and most satisfying interiors in London: rooms are hung salon-style from floor to ceiling, a sarcophagus of Seti I anchors the basement, Hogarth's complete Rake's Progress series is displayed on folding wooden panels, and the Picture Room achieves an implausible density by mounting paintings on hinged planes that open outward. Admission is free. The house accepts around 100,000 visitors a year, which keeps it intimate by London standards.
Mauritshuis, The Hague
The Mauritshuis holds one of the most precisely edited collections in the world: 800 works, exclusively Dutch and Flemish Golden Age painting, displayed in a seventeenth-century classical townhouse on the Hofvijver lake in The Hague. The collection's highlights are among the most recognisable works in Western art — Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, and The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius — but the house scale means you can stand close to each one without the press of bodies you would face at the Louvre or the Rijksmuseum.
A 2012-14 renovation and expansion added underground gallery space and improved the building's facilities while preserving the intimacy of the historic rooms. The Mauritshuis charges admission; combined tickets with other Hague institutions are available.
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
The Musée Marmottan occupies a nineteenth-century hunting lodge in the sixteenth arrondissement of Paris and holds the world's largest collection of works by Claude Monet — over 300 paintings, including the 1872 canvas Impression, Sunrise, from which the term Impressionism derives. The collection was assembled in large part through the 1966 bequest of Michel Monet, the painter's son, who donated 65 canvases his father had kept throughout his life.
The museum is a twenty-minute Metro ride from the Louvre but draws a fraction of the crowd. Its basement galleries, purpose-built to hold the Monet bequest, display late Water Lilies canvases and the series of Rouen Cathedral and Haystacks paintings in conditions that favour close looking. The museum also holds a significant collection of illuminated manuscripts and Impressionist works by Berthe Morisot, Renoir, and Sisley.
Museum of Broken Relationships, Zagreb
Founded in 2006 by artists Olinka Vistica and Drazen Grubisic following the end of their own relationship, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb is built entirely from donated objects: the physical debris of relationships that have ended, each accompanied by a text written by the donor. A wedding dress. A garden gnome that travelled 500 kilometres as a joke that stopped being funny. A prosthetic leg. An ex-partner's favourite cookbook with all the recipes scrawled over.
The museum won the Council of Europe Museum Prize in 2011 and has spawned a travelling exhibition that has visited cities across Europe and North America. It has also inspired a Los Angeles outpost. The Zagreb original, in a Baroque palace on the Upper Town, is one of the most emotionally direct museum experiences available anywhere — partly because it deals entirely in ordinary objects and ordinary losses, which are more universal than anything in the Louvre.
Museum of Innocence, Istanbul
The Museum of Innocence in Istanbul was conceived simultaneously with the novel of the same name by Orhan Pamuk, published in 2008. The novel tells the story of an Istanbul collector's obsessive love, and Pamuk spent a decade assembling the physical objects described in the book — over 83 glass display cases of mid-twentieth-century Istanbul material culture, each corresponding to a chapter of the novel. Cigarette stubs, ticket stubs, a small dog-shaped pepper mill, earrings, menus, photographs: the objects are simultaneously props for a fictional story and real artefacts of a vanished Istanbul.
Pamuk donated his Nobel Prize money to establish the museum, which opened in 2012 in the Cukurcuma neighbourhood. It is a genuinely unusual institution — a museum that explains itself through a novel, or a novel that completes itself in a museum.
Museum of Bad Art, Boston
The Museum of Bad Art in Dedham, Massachusetts (with a second location in Somerville) collects art that is not good in a way that is interesting. The collection is curated with genuine rigour: works that are merely competent but boring are rejected, as are works that are so bad as to be simply unpleasant. The MOBA is looking specifically for ambition that has failed heroically — paintings in which a recognisable artistic aspiration has produced an outcome that is baffling, disturbing, or involuntarily funny.
Sunday on the Pot with George, a portrait of George Washington on a toilet painted in a style loosely derived from the Sunday in the Park with George Seurat, is the kind of work the MOBA treasures. The collection is curated and displayed with the same seriousness as a legitimate institution, which is the joke and the point simultaneously.
Cuckooland Museum, Cheshire
The Cuckooland Museum in Tabley, Cheshire, holds one of the largest collections of antique cuckoo clocks in the world: over 600 Black Forest cuckoo clocks assembled by brothers Roman and Maz Piekarski over four decades, ranging from simple mid-nineteenth-century mechanisms to elaborate carved hunting-scene cases with multiple moving figures. The brothers restore each clock to working order.
The museum operates from a converted farmhouse by appointment, which gives visits a character closer to a private collection tour than a public institution visit. It is the only cuckooland in the world, which is either a recommendation or a warning depending on your relationship with small mechanical birds.
Sulabh International Toilet Museum, New Delhi
The Sulabh International Museum of Toilets in Dwarka, New Delhi, was established by Bindeshwar Pathak, the sanitation reformer and founder of the Sulabh International Social Service Organisation, as part of a broader effort to change attitudes toward sanitation in India. The museum traces the history of toilets and sanitation from 2500 BCE to the present, covering ancient Harappan plumbing, the chamber pots of the European aristocracy, Victorian sanitary reform, and contemporary developments in low-cost sanitation technology.
The museum is unusual in that its subject matter is simultaneously comic, historical, and urgent: inadequate sanitation kills more people annually than almost any other preventable cause, and Sulabh's work in constructing community toilet blocks across India has directly improved health outcomes for millions of people. The museum makes this case with missionary seriousness while displaying objects that are objectively funny.
All of these institutions are on or near the map — they are small enough that searching by city will bring them close to larger institutions you may already be visiting.