Frank Gehry's only Canadian building, in the neighbourhood he grew up in, holding the largest collection of Canadian art anywhere.
The AGO holds around 120,000 works and the largest collection of Canadian art in the world.
Gehry
Frank Gehry was born in Toronto in 1929 and grew up a few streets from the gallery; his grandmother lived on Beverley Street and he visited the AGO as a child. The 2008 transformation was his first building in Canada.
It is uncharacteristically restrained by his standards. The Dundas Street front is a 180-metre curved glass and Douglas fir façade — a “crystalline glass wing” — rather than the crumpled titanium he is known for.
Inside, the Galleria Italia runs the length of that façade in laminated timber, and a spiral staircase in blue-painted steel and wood climbs through the roof to the contemporary galleries. Both are the reason to go even if you ignore the art.
The comparison with the ROM’s Crystal, opened a year earlier, is unavoidable and Toronto makes it constantly. Gehry’s is generally reckoned the more successful.
The collection
The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson — the landscape painters who between about 1913 and 1933 defined how Canada looks to itself. The Thomson holding, including The West Wind and dozens of small oil sketches on board, is the largest anywhere. Whether you find them thrilling or repetitive, they matter enormously here.
Indigenous and Canadian art are presented together rather than in separate wings, a change made deliberately, with substantial Inuit holdings including the Sarick Collection.
European — a Rubens, Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Renoir, Van Gogh, Picasso.
The Thomson Collection, given by Ken Thomson in 2002 along with the funding for the Gehry rebuild: over 2,000 works including the model ships and the largest collection of ship models in a public gallery, plus European medieval and Renaissance objects.
Photography and contemporary, including a strong Canadian holding.
The Grange
The gallery is built around The Grange, a Georgian brick house of 1817 and the oldest surviving brick house in Toronto, which was the AGO’s original home. It is restored and open.
Practicalities
Ticketed, with the annual pass usually the better value. Free access is offered to under-25s. Special exhibitions cost extra.
Allow three hours. St Patrick station is five minutes away.
Grange Park behind it is open and has a Henry Moore sculpture; the AGO holds the largest public collection of Moore in the world, in a purpose-built gallery he helped design.
More Museums
Royal Ontario Museum
Canada's largest museum, with a Libeskind crystal crashing through the front of it that the city has never agreed about.
Aga Khan Museum
A white granite box by Fumihiko Maki holding Islamic art, in a park in suburban Toronto, and worth the journey.
Hockey Hall of Fame
The Stanley Cup, in a former bank hall with a stained-glass dome, and you are allowed to touch it.