The Vilnius Art Museum, founded in 1933, is the largest national institution housing works of historical and cultural value. It features works by Lithuanian and foreign masters, including pieces of visual and applied arts. The Vilnius State Art Museum includes several branches: the Vilnius Picture Gallery, the Museum of Applied Arts, the Museum of Clocks, the Museum of Miniature Arts, and the Gallery of Artist Pranas Domšaitis.

The museum's exhibition consists of items acquired or donated to decorate the interiors of the Palace of the Rulers, which is currently being restored. These antique exhibits possess significant artistic value.

In the museum's basement, one can see part of the city wall from the 12th and 14th centuries, fragments of wooden pavement, and stone masonry. The first exhibition of applied arts was opened in 1987 in the renovated part of the building, and it became a branch of the Lithuanian Art Museum.

The Lithuanian Art Museum unites several museums and galleries in Vilnius. Its extensive collection, numbering around 230,000 items of visual, decorative-applied, and jewelry art, also includes a Russian collection. Among them are paintings by well-known artists such as Vasily Tropinin, Vasily Perov, Ilya Repin, Boris Kustodiev, and others, totaling about 300 canvases.

Some paintings entered the museum as early as the 19th century when many artists from Vilnius studied in St. Petersburg and brought back works from their teachers at the Academy of Arts, such as Fyodor Bruni. Some paintings belonged to the Lithuanian nobility, including works by Ivan Aivazovsky and Arkhip Kuindzhi. During the Soviet era, paintings from Moscow and Leningrad, including works by Konstantin Makovsky, were added to the Vilnius galleries.