Picture Books about Art & Museums

When I was in sixth grade, my family moved to Maryland for a year. We acted like tourists, spending each weekend in D.C. or Baltimore, exploring museums and monuments. It awakened my love of art, and I returned home to Michigan with posters of Monet and Matisse to decorate my bedroom walls.

When I became a parent, I enjoyed sharing picture books that focus on art and museums. We’ve even take some of these with us to the museums to find all the works of art featured! It made for a fun scavenger hunt.

Are there other art- and museum-themed picture books you love? Let me know which ones I’m missing.

A Tale of Two Williams by Diana Golden, Inge Heckel, and Carl Mydans (1977)

This book, produced by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sadly now out of print, tells of a boy named William who meets a hippo named William (an Egyptian artifact) who shows him around the museum. Full of beautiful photographs, it gives a child’s view of the collection’s treasures, from the Temple of Dendur to the knights and armor. I loved this book as a child. It was a treat to introduce to it my kid and then show them all the wonders in the museum itself. Finding William the hippo is a requirement for any trip we make to the museum.

A Visit to Washington, D.C. by Jill Krementz (1987)

I adored the Jill Krementz books A Very Young Dancer and A Very Young Gymnast when I was a kid. (I still have my childhood copies!) At the end of our year in Maryland, my parents gave me this book by Krementz with a personalized inscription from the author! The book follows six-year-old Matt as he shows readers around his hometown, including monuments, memorials, the botanic gardens, the National Museum of Natural History, the Air and Space Museum, and the National Gallery of Art. Krementz’s photos are, as always, rich and intriguing.

You Can’t Take a Balloon into the Metropolitan Museum by Jacqueline Preiss Weitzman and Robin Preiss Glasser (1998)

This wordless book is a delight from cover to cover. A kid and her grandparent are going to the Metropolitan Museum. The security guard stops her from bringing in a balloon and promises to take care of it. The balloon gets away from him, and he must chase after it. The parallel stories of the quest for the balloon and the art in the museum then unfold. Each spread has so many details to explore.

Art & Max by David Wiesner (2010)

Art and Max are lizards. Art is a skilled painter. Max wants to learn. Art suggests that Max paint him as a subject. Max misunderstands and applies paint to Art’s body. Chaos, with references to different styles and periods of art, ensues, until all that is left of Art is a line. Max must reconstruct Art from scratch. Art ends up a pointillist masterpiece. Very fun and charming.

Imagine! by Raúl Colón (2018)

This wordless book shows a kid skateboarding through the city to the Museum of Modern Art. Inside, he connects with the art so much that it comes to life and explores the museum and the city with him. Back at home, he paints a mural of the characters from the paintings he saw. A paean to the city and its art.