The best museums embody its cities’ ambitions and fulfill the ideal that anyone can walk in for a moment of rest and leave with a buzzing brain or stirred soul, write Philip Kennicott and Sebastian Smee for The Washington Post.

The publication has ranked the top 20 museums in America, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art has ranked fourth on the list.

“Wander through the engagingly old-fashioned display of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s permanent collection galleries — a linear march of period rooms full of art, furniture and priceless house wares, arrayed like trophies — and you’ll keep seeing old friends,” wrote Kennicott.

Among them are a magnificent Crucifixion by Rogier van der Weyden, essential works by Cézanne and Monet, and Winslow Homer’s thrilling “The Life Line.”

The collection helps express the catholic taste and tenacious ambition of the city, while the museum’s temporary exhibition galleries are rather dispiriting, architecturally, “but a renovation plan by architect Frank Gehry has effectively opened up and transformed other parts of the museum’s hilltop building,” Kennicott added.

As the fourth-ranked, Philadelphia Museum of Art trails the National Gallery of Art (No.3) in Washington D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago (No. 2); and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (No. 1) in New York.

Read more about the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the other top art museums in the nation in The Washington Post.

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