SMK - Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

SMK is Denmark’s national gallery, and the building before you houses art from the fourteenth century to the present. Its original structure was designed by Vilhelm Dahlerup and G. E.

W. Møller, and it opened in 1896 in Renaissance Revival form. The collections hold almost 9,000 paintings and sculptures, alongside approximately 240,000 works on paper and more than 2,600 plaster casts.

European art from 1300 to 1800 includes Mantegna, Cranach, Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt. A modern extension, completed in 1998, contains later art and connects to the older building through a glass-covered Street of Sculptures. The museum’s French modernist holdings have an unexpected story: Johannes Rump offered them in 1923, but the director declined; after Rump’s death, the collection arrived as a donation in 1928.