The Art Institute’s encyclopedic collection–the third largest collection of art in the country–consists of approximately 300,000 works of art in 11 curatorial departments. Areas of particularly strong holdings are Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings; American art; Japanese prints; and contemporary art. Among the best known works are: Gustave Caillebotte’s Paris Street; Rainy Day; Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on the Isle of La Grande Jatte–1884; Grant Wood’s American Gothic; Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks; and Pablo Picasso’s The Old Guitarist. The Art Institute also houses an architecture and design collection of more than 140,000 fragments, models, renderings, and related materials; one of the leading museum libraries in the country, the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries; one of the largest and most prominent collections of paperweights; and the Thorne Miniature Rooms, 68 truly unique small-scale recreations of European, American, and Asian domestic interiors.
