Oslo City Museum (Oslo Bymuseum) — Attraction in Oslo

Visited using Oslo pass, highly recommend for convenience.

The museum has 2 main exhibitions. One presents thé History of Oslo city and tangential things such as the developmemt of kitchens throughout Time and changes in diets with Time.

The second IS an art exhibition.

Of the exhibition on oslo's history my favourite is the medieval section explaining the city's foundation.

I also really appreciated the section on the development at the turn of the industrial revolution and the colonial era history

Addtionally for those more inclined to the performing arts the museums exhibition on opera and ballet provides a brilliant History. The operahouse tours breifly touch on this but the exhibition here really brings it to life with a greater variety of costumes , props and model stages to see.

The section on the second World War exhibit is slightly lacking and imo pales in comparison with the resistance museum at akerhaus.

The art exhibition IS also Splendid. In this exhibition i discovered the work of Joachim Frich and found his Italianesque paintings of landscapes some of the more impressive landscape paintings ive witnessed to date. His works really have sharp contours and well defined contours which i feel is lacking from a lot of similar works which feature warm colours and belnding of objects.

Overall a fantastic experience and i highly...

Oslo has a rich history of social and political development. This city museum within Frognerparken provides a good sampling of that development. Yes, as others note, there is some lack of logical "flow" to the museum, somewhat easy to get lost, and several artifacts lack English descriptions (we used Google translate camera quite a bit.)

But if you get over those minor limitations, this museum has much to offer. One section depicts Oslo's origins, evolving landscape, and social and political developments over the centuries. Another area displays Oslo lifestyles from the 17th century to 1950s -- from food tins to household appliances. Another section is devoted to Oslo theatre over the past century, including displays of theatre costumes, props, and posters.

Oslo Bymuseet also has a very nice art collection, which certainly enhanced my limited knowledge of several Norwegian artists (Fritz Thaulow, Gudmund Stenersen, Peder Cappelen Thurmann, etc). This area even has a set of watercolours painted by Edvard Munch early in his career.

Our visit was followed by an enjoyable light snack and coffee/tea from the café, which we ate at the outdoor tables and chairs (they also have indoor seating).

Visited in...

Interesting museum with information about Oslo’s history. Definitely worth a stop if you’re in the area and okay with a 120NOK ticket price. Relatively small museum but the main exhibit was great - detailed Oslo’s history and changes through the years/decades of the 1900s, which gave some very interesting context to our observations about the city from our previous 3 days there.

As others have noted, there are some areas where the text isn’t translated to English, so we weren’t able to get much out of those areas, but it wasn’t a huge portion of the museum.

The special exhibits when we were there were (1) about residents’ experiences in the 1960s-80s in the city, which was interesting but very specific (and also similar to the 70s in the US), (2) about women artists in Oslo (ft. Lots of paintings, drawings, sculptures by Norwegian women), and (3) women’s fashion through the years. We didn’t spend much time in any of them but I imagine they would’ve been fairly interesting for locals (or others) interested in those specific topics.

Overall, good museum, and we learned a fair amount about the history of the city that we found ourselves discussing through the rest of our trip. Would...