The World's Great Museums – answers and explanations
Here are the answers to all 15 questions in the The World's Great Museums quiz, each with a short explanation. Masterpieces, palaces turned galleries and famous heists from the world's greatest museums. Haven't played yet? Take the quiz first and compare your score.
Play the quiz · 15 questions1. In a 2004 armed daylight raid, 'The Scream' was taken from which Oslo museum?
Answer: The Munch Museum
On 22 August 2004 two masked gunmen snatched 'The Scream' and 'Madonna' from Oslo's Munch Museum in front of visitors; both works were recovered by police in 2006. An earlier version was stolen from the National Gallery in 1994.
2. The Musée d'Orsay in Paris is housed in a grand building originally built as what?
Answer: A railway station
The Musee d'Orsay occupies the former Gare d'Orsay, a Beaux-Arts railway station designed by Victor Laloux that opened on 28 May 1900 for the Paris Universal Exhibition; after closing to mainline trains in 1939 it reopened as a museum in December 1986.
3. Rembrandt's huge canvas 'The Night Watch' is the star attraction of which museum?
Answer: The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Rembrandt's 1642 group portrait of a civic militia company, known as The Night Watch, hangs in the Gallery of Honour of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where it has been the subject of the public restoration project Operation Night Watch.
4. Stolen in 1911, how long was the Mona Lisa missing from the Louvre?
Answer: About two years
Vincenzo Peruggia took the Mona Lisa from the Louvre on 21 August 1911, and it was only recovered in Florence in December 1913 when he tried to sell it, meaning it was gone for more than two years.
5. Which Paris museum has a glass pyramid at its main entrance?
Answer: The Louvre
Architect I. M. Pei's glass pyramid opened in 1989 as the Louvre's main entrance, in the museum's central courtyard.
6. In the 1990 Gardner Museum heist in Boston, the thieves posed as what?
Answer: Police officers
In the early hours of 18 March 1990, two men dressed as Boston police claimed to be answering a disturbance call, were let in, tied up the guards and took 13 works including a Vermeer and Rembrandts, still unrecovered.
7. Which New York museum owns Vincent van Gogh's 'The Starry Night'?
Answer: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)
Van Gogh's 'The Starry Night', painted in June 1889 from his room at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum near Saint-Remy, has been in the Museum of Modern Art in New York since 1941, acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest.
8. The State Hermitage Museum occupies which former home of the Russian tsars?
Answer: The Winter Palace
The State Hermitage in St Petersburg is centred on the Winter Palace, the Baroque residence built for Empress Elizabeth by Rastrelli and used by the tsars until 1917; Catherine the Great founded the collection there in 1764.
9. Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral-shaped Guggenheim Museum stands in which city?
Answer: New York
Frank Lloyd Wright's spiralling Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened on New York's Fifth Avenue in 1959; Bilbao's Guggenheim was designed by Frank Gehry.
10. The Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, was unearthed in 1799 by whose troops?
Answer: Napoleon's French army
French soldiers under officer Pierre-Francois Bouchard found the Rosetta Stone in July 1799 while rebuilding Fort Julien near Rosetta during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign; Britain took it after the 1801 surrender and it entered the British Museum in 1802.
11. Velázquez's masterpiece 'Las Meninas' is the star of which Madrid museum?
Answer: The Prado
Diego Velazquez painted Las Meninas in 1656 and it hangs in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, where it is the collection's centrepiece. It shows the Infanta Margarita with her ladies-in-waiting, with the painter himself at his easel.
12. London's Tate Modern gallery is housed in a converted what?
Answer: A power station
Tate Modern occupies the former Bankside Power Station, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott and decommissioned in 1981. Herzog & de Meuron converted it, and the gallery opened in May 2000 with the vast Turbine Hall as its entrance space.
13. Which Florence gallery displays Botticelli's 'The Birth of Venus'?
Answer: The Uffizi
Botticelli's The Birth of Venus, painted around 1485, is displayed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, alongside his Primavera. Both works came from Medici family collections.
14. In which film does Ben Stiller play a night guard whose museum comes alive?
Answer: Night at the Museum
In Night at the Museum (2006), Ben Stiller's guard discovers that the exhibits of New York's American Museum of Natural History come alive after dark.
15. The Hermitage collection began with art bought by which Russian ruler?
Answer: Catherine the Great
The Hermitage dates its founding to 1764, when Catherine the Great bought a collection of paintings from Berlin merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. The museum opened to the public in 1852.