Museum Boijmans van Beuningen

Lonely Planet review

Among Europe's very finest museums, the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen has a permanent collection spanning all eras of Dutch and European art, including superb old masters. Among the highlights are The Marriage at Cana by Hieronymus Bosch, the Three Maries at the Open Sepulchre by Van Eyck, the minutely detailed Tower of Babel by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, and Portrait of Titus and Man in a Red Cap by Rembrandt.

Renaissance Italy is well represented; look for The Wise and Foolish Virgins by Tintoretto and Satyr and Nymph by Titian.

Paintings and sculpture since the mid-19th century are another strength. There are many Monets and other French impressionists; Van Gogh and Gauguin are given space; and there are statues by Degas. The museum rightly prides itself on its collection by a group it calls 'the other surrealists' including Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte and Man Ray. Salvador Dalí gained a special room in the recent expansion and the collection is one of the largest of his work outside Spain and France. All in all, the surrealist wing is utterly absorbing, with ephemera and paraphernalia rubbing against famous works.

Modern modes are not forgotten, and the whole place is nothing if not eclectic: a nude or an old master might be nestled next to a '70s bubble TV - some kind of installation - or a vibrating table. There's also a good café, a pleasant sculpture garden (featuring Claes Oldenburg's famous Bent Screw , among others), a library with more than 125,000 reference books, and wheelchair access/assistance throughout. Even the traditional 'museum floor plan' is abetted by an innovation the curators call 'The Data Cloud'. It's a three-D interactive multimedia map on the entrance floor that is a brilliant work of design in itself - it allows visitors to find instantly, via a 'holographic projection portal', the location of (and information about) any item in the museum's 120,000 piece collection.