2 Best Sights in Side Trips from Copenhagen, Denmark

Ordrupgaard is one of the largest museum collections of French impressionism in Europe outside France itself, and it reopened in late 2020 after a major renovation. Most of the great 19th-century French artists are represented, including Manet, Monet, Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir, Degas, Gauguin, Sisley, Delacroix, and Pissarro. Ordrupgaard also has a superb collection of Danish Golden Age painters and spectacular works by Vilhelm Hammershøi, whose deft use of light and space creates haunting settings for his mostly solitary figures. The paintings hang on the walls of what was once the home of museum founder and art collector Wilhelm Hansen. The interior of this manor, dating from 1918, has been left just as it was when Hansen and his wife Henny lived here. In 2005 a black, curvaceous addition, designed by the acclaimed Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid, joined the main building. In addition to extra exhibition space, the new structure made room for a spacious café that overlooks the park. There are labels in English.

Architect Søren Robert Lund was just 25 and still a student when he was awarded the commission for the ARKEN Museum for Moderne Kunst, which is set against the flat coast southwest of Copenhagen. ARKEN, or "the ark," which opened in 1996, is a building with a ship's features: sail-like protrusions and narrow red corridors that evoke a submarine. The museum's massive sculpture room exhibits both modern Danish and international art. The hall is narrow in one end and wider in the other to provoke illusions of space and proximity, depending on where you stand. The café, which looks like a ship's bridge, offers nice views of Køge Bugt.