The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes opened in 1910 in a beaux-arts building designed by Emilio Jecquier at the eastern end of the Parque Forestal — the same building that houses the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in its south wing. The structure is one of Jecquier's most resolved works: a glass dome over the central hall, symmetrical facades, and a colonnaded entrance that establishes the seriousness of what lies behind it. The permanent collection runs from colonial religious painting through nineteenth-century landscape and costumbrismo to twentieth-century Chilean modernism — an arc of Chilean visual culture that reads as a continuous argument about what this country sees when it looks at itself. The special exhibitions are consistently among the strongest in South America. The building itself is a reason to visit: the dome light and the main hall's proportion are an argument for the civic museum as an architectural proposition, not merely a container.
Parque Forestal, Santiago, Chile