The Peruvian penguins look at an artwork in the museum.

Closed because of the coronavirus lockdown, the Nelson-Atkins museum in Kansas City, Missouri, is currently out of bounds for human visitors.

However, a group of three Peruvian penguins from a nearby zoo got a chance to waddle around the museum's empty interiors.

The shuttered art museum welcomed the three two-foot-high visitors from Kansas City Zoo, giving them an exclusive viewing of its artefacts.

The museum shared a video on Twitter and tweeted: "We’ve had some dapper guests visit the museum before but these little tuxedoed visitors are our favourites."

The @KansasCityZoo treated the penguins to a little culture before the zoo re-opens.

 The penguins stroll around the museum.

CEO Julián Zugazagoitia welcomed the “special friends” from the zoo, who waddled around quietly in a two-foot-tall phalanx to peruse the works on display, stopping here and there.

The Nelson-Atkins boasts an internationally renowned collection of art from across the world, with more than 34,000 objects including African art and sculpture spanning two millennia, a vast Asian collection, and paintings by European masters from El Greco to Reubens to Van Gogh.

While wild penguins are not known for their taste in high culture — though in fairness, their craggy and sometimes freezing marine habitats are seldom blessed with vibrant art scenes — they do have a clear intelligence about them, regularly performing feats of memory and navigation as well as selective listening and rapid information processing.

According to the zoo’s CEO, Randy Wisthoff, a trip to the museum, it seems, was just the thing to lift their spirits and open their minds.

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“Taking care of wild animals at the Kansas City Zoo, we’re always looking to enrich their lives and stimulate their days,” he said.

“And during this shutdown period, our animals really miss having visitors come out and see them.”

Mr Zugazagoitia said they made their feelings clear enough. “We’re seeing how they’re reacting to art.

They seem to react much better to Caravaggio than Monet. And these are Peruvian penguins, so we were speaking a bit in Spanish, and they really appreciated art history.”