The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes

The Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes was inaugurated in December 1896 in the Bon Marché store building on Florida Street, now the Galerías Pacífico. Ever since its inception, the Museum has been thought of as a space in which to house international art of all periods, and to promote and strengthen Argentine art, still in its beginnings at the time of the Museum's founding.

Around 1910, in the era of the Centennial of the May Revolution, the Museum already had in its collection pieces by masters such as Francisco de Goya, Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida, Edgar Degas and Pierre-Auguste Renoir.

In 1911, the second home for Bellas Artes was inaugurated: the Argentine Pavilion, a monumental structure the country had used in the Paris World's Fair of 1889 and which was later moved from France and set up in Buenos Aires on Plaza San Martín. There new acquisitions were exhibited that rounded out the collection, including Édouard Manet'sThe Nymph Surprised, and Claude Monet's Banks of the Seine.