Art Gallery of Ontario Review

If you’re ever in Toronto, the Art Gallery of Ontario can be a wonderful place to visit with your kids, even if they’re not into art. Let me explain, we are not artsy but we have studied art in our homeschool so they are familiar with some famous artist through our artist studies. However, it’s not their favorite subject unless they’re drawing a battle scene or something.

We hit a lot of traffic getting to Toronto so we didn’t have nearly enough time to spend as we would have liked, the kids did ask to go back which is wonderful. I’d love to have more time to explore and enjoy what we were looking at and read about each of the paintings. 

My oldest son and I both enjoyed the older style paintings from the 1500’s or so. They had so much character and we did spend a lot of time in this gallery then the rest of the museum. Unfortunately, in this area where they had these huge beautiful paintings on display, they didn’t have the rope around them like they did in the other rooms and my daughter went all wild trying to touch them all. 

We could have stayed longer but I had to watch like a hawk in that area. The other rooms were not a concern for us since they cordoned off the area in front of the paintings. In this gallery there was a stairway that you could go up and take pictures from so my boys headed up there with their camera to take photos. All of these pictures are from them and they photographed everything they found of interest. 

My son is a history buff which is why he enjoyed more of the landscape paintings. My younger son thought it was hilarious that so many of the older paintings had nude people in them. He really enjoyed the section they had a large sailboat and old boat models and they even had paintings of the ships that were used in the olden days. This was really what grasped him and held his interest. He didn’t care for art work about people he didn’t know.

So we went through the whole museum and then I realized they had a kids area, but we had somehow missed it. By the time we got there it was already close to closing time, everyone was packing up. From what I could see, it did look like a lot of fun was just had with lots of hands on activities. I’d love to go back just to see what we missed. I’m sure my daughter would have had a great time here as there wasn’t that many opportunities with hands on activities with the art work on display which is understandable.

The gallery is open from 10am to 5:30pm 6 days a week, it is closed on Mondays. Admission for an adult is $19.50, a  youth (6-11) is $11 while children 5 and under are free. If you’d like to see the special exhibit, it would be a bit more.