The international collection: a remarkable group of Spanish paintings, a good Egyptian holding, and a hall of plaster casts.
Opened in 1906 as part of the millennium building programme, the Museum of Fine Arts holds Hungary’s collection of art from outside Hungary — the Hungarian material is across the river in the National Gallery.
The core of it came from the Esterházy family, whose collection the state bought in 1870, and that purchase is why a museum in Budapest has one of the strongest holdings of Spanish painting outside Spain.
The Spanish rooms
There are seven El Greco paintings here, which is more than almost anywhere outside Toledo and Madrid. There are Goyas, a Velázquez, Murillo, Ribera and Zurbarán. If you have a single hour, spend it in these rooms.
The rest
The Italian collection includes Raphael’s Esterházy Madonna, which was famously stolen in 1983 along with six other paintings and recovered in a Greek monastery two months later. There is good Dutch and Flemish work, a Rembrandt or two depending on current attribution, and a large German and Austrian holding.
The Egyptian collection is small by the standards of London or Turin but well presented, with coffins, mummies and a reconstructed tomb chamber.
The Renaissance Hall and the Romanesque Hall are worth seeing as rooms rather than for their contents. The Romanesque Hall was damaged in the war, used for storage for decades, and only reopened after the museum’s long restoration finished in 2018. It is a spectacular space.
Upstairs, the collection of plaster casts of classical and Renaissance sculpture is a survival of a nineteenth-century idea of how art should be taught, and is oddly moving for that reason.
Practicalities
Temporary exhibitions are ticketed separately and are often the reason for a queue. The permanent collection is large; two to three hours is realistic, more if you linger. The Műcsarnok directly opposite is a different institution with no permanent collection, so do not confuse the two.
More Museums
Hungarian National Museum
The national story from the Roman period to the end of communism, in the building where the 1848 revolution began.
House of Terror
The headquarters of both the fascist and the communist secret police, in the same building, presented as a single continuous horror.
Hospital in the Rock
An emergency hospital and nuclear bunker in the caves under Castle Hill, kept secret until 2002.