The Speed Art Museum, originally known as the J B Speed Memorial museum is one of the oldest, largest and foremost museum of art located in Louisville, Kentucky. This museum offers its visitors wide variety of unique art experiences in its world class collection and international exhibitions.

The Speed Art museum houses ancient, classical and modern art from around the world. The main focus of this collection is on Western art from antiquity to present day art. This museum has paintings from Netherlands, French and Italian works. Admission to this museum is absolutely free.

At present this museum receives around 180,000 visitors every year and its maintenance is taken care of by the donations, endowments, grants, ticket sales and membership fee.

The Speed Art Museum houses masterpieces that are more than 6000 years old. These masterpieces include those from Egyptian to modern and contemporary art. Some of the art works you would unable to stop yourself from admiring are:

- Funeral of Mummy - This painting shows the burial barge of a mummy and two other vessels on the Nile at twilight just as the setting sun lights the hilltops. This rare oil painting was done by Bridgman, one of the most successful American painters of late 19th century.

- George Peter Alexander Healy - Sally Ward was the daughter of a wealth Kentucky politician and grew up in Louisville. Mrs Sally has been shown as a true southern belle in this portrait.

- The other popular collections displayed in this museum are Henry Moore, Mary Cassatt, Lucas Cranach, Nigeria, Yoruba people, ljeba-Obe, Tony Cragg, Constantin Brancusi, Junan Munoz, Native American Sioux, Auguste Rodin, Helen Frankenthaler and several others.

These collections and many more make The Speed Art Museum in Louisville a must visit place for all the tourists.

Louisville, Kentucky is home for the Speed Art Museum which was founded close to a century ago. Though J.B Speed, the wife of Hattie Bishop Speed had originally founded the museum as a memorial for her husband, over time, it has grown to be the oldest and largest museum with a distinguished array of 13,000 art pieces among its permanent collections.

An endowment set up by the Speed family funds the museum and stipulates that the museum shall never charge a fee for admission. In modern times however, a donation of $4 per visitor is recommended. To learn more about the Speed Art museum you should visit the following web sites:

Explore Speed Art Museum

http://www.speedmuseum.org/planning_a_visit.html

As part of its ongoing activities, the Speed Art museum holds several events across the calendar and to find the event that tunes in with your visit to Louisville, you should visit this web site:

Events at Speed Art Museum

http://www.speedmuseum.org/events.html

Among the recent events at the museum was 'Karsh 100′ which is an exhibition of photographs of some of world's most famous people during the 20th century captured on celluloid by Yousuf Karsh, the famous photographer. This event closed on the 27th of June 2010. However, exhaustive details of this exhibition can be gathered from this website.

Understanding Karsh 100

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36

Among the various portraits of famous personalities exhibited during the event one iconic portrait stands out and that is Winston Churchill, photographed by Karsh in 1941 when the British Premier visited Canada. In course of time, this outstanding portrait became the beginning of a long photographic career spanning 60 years for Karsh.

Speed Art Museum on Wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_Art_Museum