Who Painted It
Match famous paintings to their painters in a free, timed browser game. Twenty works, four names each.
ArtFamous Museums
The world great museums sit in a small number of cities, and most of them began as royal or civic collections. Below: the links worth knowing.
Choose your difficulty
Pick a level to start playing. You can switch at any time.
How to play
Read the museum, then tap the city it stands in.
Tip: your progress and best score are saved in this browser only.
Related games
Art Movements
Match each art movement to its leading figure in a free, timed browser game. Impressionism, Cubism, Baroque and more.
ArtInstrument Families
Sort orchestra instruments into their families in a free, timed browser game. Strings, woodwind, brass, percussion and keyboard.
ArtArt Words
Match art vocabulary to its meaning in a free, timed browser game. Chiaroscuro, impasto, fresco, grisaille.
ArtMixing Colours
Mix colours in your head in a free timed browser game. What red and yellow make, the primary and secondary sets, opposite colours.
ArtWhat you are actually practicing
The great museums of the world sit in a surprisingly small number of cities, and most of them began as royal, civic or university collections rather than as purpose-built museums. Paris has the Louvre and the Musée d'Orsay, London has the British Museum and the National Gallery, and New York has the Metropolitan, the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art.
Learning museum and city as a pair is also a quiet geography lesson, because it maps the tourist cities onto their art.
How the game works
You are shown a museum and four possible cities. Tap the one it stands in. A wrong pick shows the answer immediately.
Easy uses the seven best-known museums. Medium widens the pool. Hard uses the full list.
The links worth knowing
Paris: the Louvre, which began as a royal palace, and the Musée d'Orsay, which was a railway station.
London: the British Museum, the Tate Modern, which was a power station, and the National Gallery.
Madrid and Florence: the Prado in Madrid holds the Spanish royal collection, and the Uffizi in Florence was built as offices for the Medici administration.
Northern Europe: the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was a royal museum. The Hermitage in Saint Petersburg was the Winter Palace of the tsars, and the Pushkin State Museum in Moscow grew out of a university museum.
Central Europe: the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
The Americas: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art all sit in New York.
Southern Europe: the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. The Vatican Museums in Vatican City, which is a state of its own.
Elsewhere: the Acropolis Museum in Athens, and the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
How to get faster
Group them by city rather than by museum. If you learn that New York holds three of the names on this list, that single fact answers three questions at once, and the same trick works for London and Paris.
A note on two names
The Pushkin Museum is named after the poet Alexander Pushkin rather than a founder, and the Tate Modern is named for the sugar magnate Henry Tate, whose collection started the original gallery. Both are easy to misremember as place names.