Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza - Madrid, Spain
N 40° 24.991 W 003° 41.687
30T E 441055 N 4474219
The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum fills the historical gaps in the collections of the two other major art museums in Spain, the Prado Museum, and the Reina Sofia national galleries.
Waymark Code: WMZ5QR
Location: Comunidad de Madrid, Spain
Date Posted: 09/14/2018
Views: 7
With over 1,600 paintings, it was once the second largest private collection in the world after the British Royal Collection. A competition was held to house the core of the collection in 1987–88 after Baron Thyssen, having tried to enlarge his Museum in Lugano (Villa Favorita), searched for a location in Europe.
The collection was started in the 1920s as a private collection by Heinrich, Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza de Kászon. In a reversal of the movement of European paintings to the US during this period, one of the elder Baron's sources was the collections of American millionaires coping with the Great Depression and inheritance taxes.
The collection was later expanded by Heinrich's son Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.
In 1985, the Baron married Carmen "Tita" Cervera (a former Miss Spain 1961) and introduced her to art collecting. Cervera's influence was decisive in persuading the Baron to relocate the core of his collection to Spain where the local government had a building available next to the Prado.
The Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum officially opened in 1992, showing 715 works of art. A year later, the Spanish Government bought 775 works for $350 million. These pieces are now in the purpose-built museum in Madrid. After the museum opened, Cervera started her own collection and loaned 429 works to the museum in 1999 for 11 years. The loan has been renewed annually since 2012.
One of the focal points is the early European painting, with a major collection of trecento and quattrocento (i.e. 14th and 15th century) Italian paintings by Duccio, Luca di Tommè, Bernardo Daddi, Paolo Uccello, and his contemporaries, and works of the early Flemish and Dutch painters like Jan van Eyck (Diptich of the Annunciation), Petrus Christus, Rogier van der Weyden, Gerard David and Hans Memling.
Other highlights include works by leading Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo painters, including Antonello da Messina (Portrait of a Man), Fra Bartolomeo, Giulio Romano, Giovanni Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Jacopo Bassano, Sebastiano del Piombo (Portrait of Ferry Carondelet), Bernardino Luini, Agnolo Bronzino, Domenico Beccafumi, Albrecht Dürer (Christ among the Doctors), Hans Baldung Grien, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein (Portrait of Henry VIII), Caravaggio (Saint Catherine), Guercino, Sebastiano Ricci, Rubens, Van Dyck, Murillo, Rembrandt, Frans Hals (Family Portrait in a Landscape), Canaletto, Francesco Guardi, Tiepolo, Giambattista Pittoni, Watteau, François Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, Gainsborough and Pompeo Batoni, as well as two famous portraits by Domenico Ghirlandaio (Giovanna Tornabuoni) and Vittore Carpaccio (Knight in a landscape).
The Museum houses a display of North American paintings from 18th and 19th centuries, including Copley, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent.
There are Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works by the artists Claude Monet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley, Pierre Bonnard, Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, Cézanne, and Vincent van Gogh, as well as twentieth century Cubist works by Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris, and works by Edvard Munch, Egon Schiele, James Ensor, Kandinsky, Salvador Dalí, Paul Klee, Chagall, Magritte, Piet Mondrian, Edward Hopper, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, Willem De Kooning and Francis Bacon. The selection of German Expressionism is extensive, and includes Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, and Otto Dix.
Name of Source Book: 1,000 Places to See Before you Die, 2010 paperback edition.
Page Location in Source Book: 272
Type of Waymark: Site
Location of Coordinates: Entrance
Cost of Admission (Parks, Museums, etc.): 12.00 (listed in local currency)
List Available Hours, Dates, Season:
Monday: 12.00 - 16.00* Tuesday to Sunday: 10.00 to 19.00
Official Tourism Website: [Web Link]
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Visit Instructions:
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