Minor major collections
by Caroline Bugler
More or less every European town contains a museum with a surprise or two, and there are many gems among them. Few of these places can really be described as hidden (unless you count the tiny specialist establishments with a handful of visitors, such as the Guido Gezelle Museum in Bruges, devoted to the Belgian translator of Hiawatha, or Vienna's Funeral Museum), yet many lesser-known venues are pleasantly quiet, offering you the chance to while away an afternoon without having to queue for hours to get in or negotiate crowds three deep in front of the pictures.
There can be a certain pleasure about the very dustiness of presentation in some provincial galleries. But the hand of modern museology is reaching out, gradually eliminating yellowing labels and flies in the display cases. And it has to be said that some recent initiatives are breathtaking. In 2001 in Roubaix, on the outskirts of Lille, a converted Art Deco swimming pool opened as a museum of art and industry paying homage to the town's textile manufacturing past. In the cubicles where swimmers once changed, showered or took steam baths are vitrines displaying fabric designs and samples, pottery, jewellery, while a vestigial central pool is flanked by sculptures. And on the walls are 19th and 20th-century paintings, presided over by a stained glass starburst and mosaics.
La Piscine's exhibition programme is ambitious: two years ago it mounted a show of Picasso ceramics. But for a superb and intimate permanent display of them there is the Musée d'Art Moderne in Céret, the Catalan town in the Pyrenees where artists such as Picasso, Gris and Braque spent their summers away from Montmartre in the years just before the First War, when Cubism was at its height. A later generation of artists from Montparnasse, including Chagall and Soutine, also came here and left works, as did a final wave of artists escaping the Nazis, Dufy among them. Assembled in an ad hoc way by private enthusiasts and artists, the collection was rehoused in the 1990s in a splendid modern building sited on a tree-lined street that is satisfyingly shady in summer.
The story of French Modernism can be picked up half an hour's drive away at Collioure, the harbour where Matisse and Derain spent many summers translating scenes of boats bobbing on the waves and fishermen landing their catch into a vibrant Fauve idiom. There the authorities have helpfully created a kind of open-air museum - the Chemin Fauve - where reproductions of 20 paintings by Matisse and Derain are nailed to exterior walls at various points around the town, in front of the motifs they depict, inviting an exercise in compare and contrast.
There is always something very satisfying about seeing art where it was created, and even the crowds disgorged by tourist buses at Monet's home at Giverny don't quite manage to dispel the magic of the place. But a more tranquil experience is to be had a short bus ride away from the centre of Stockholm, on the island of Djurgården. Here is another artist's house offering a happy marriage between style and content; presenting an overview of Swedish art at the turn of the 20th century. It was once the home of Prins Eugen (1845-1947) a member of Sweden's royal family and a noted and prolific landscape painter and collector. In his elegant mansion you can see works by him and other artists in his circle, while a nearby gallery provides space for temporary exhibitions. The whole is set in lovely parkland, where sculptures sit amongst the ancient oaks. And the café is a perfect place to end a balmy afternoon, admiring the views over water.
The Tuscan-style villa in Munich that was once lived in by the German painter Franz von Lenbach (1836-1904) is also now a museum. Lenbach may not exactly be a household name today, though he is remembered for a handful of Italianate works and portraits of Bismarck. Pictures by him and other Munich academic painters of his generation hanging in the opulent salons of his former home are worth a look, even if they are not the main draw. Most visitors come for the superlative collection of German Expressionist paintings, housed in a special wing added on to the house when the painter Gabriele Munter bequeathed her personal collection to the museum. Munter had been Kandinsky's lover, so there are many canvases by him, and his fellow Blue Rider artists Marc and Klee. The walls in these galleries are so brilliantly coloured they almost outdo the paintings themselves.
Major galleries in important artistic centres can be daunting, and leave you longing to visit somewhere that offers a condensed version of the experience in a lower key. While Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum is undergoing a refurbishment programme that will not be completed until 2009, it is displaying selected highlights from its collection in the Phillips Wing - a digestible experience for the casual visitor. Another snapshot of Dutch urban culture from the 16th century to the present is just a short rain ride away from the Dutch capital, at Leiden's Lakenhal Museum, housed in a former Clothworkers' hall dating from the 17th century. Leiden was Rembrandt's home town, so there are early works by him and by his teacher Jan Lievens, as well as other works by the Leiden school of painters characterised by their meticulous detail.
If you lack the stamina to join the crowds queuing to get into the Uffizi in Florence, the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo is an attractive alternative setting in which to explore Italian painting from the 14th to the 19th centuries. Because this is northern Italy, the emphasis is more on northern Italian and Venetian art and less on Tuscan - although you will still find Botticelli, Raphael and Fra Angelico on the walls. Among the treasures here are two paintings of the Madonna and Child and a Dead Christ by Giovanni Bellini, two Titians and three panels by the idiosyncratic artist Lorenzo Lotto, who worked in Bergamo. (Real Lotto devotees will also make a detour to Recanati, a small hill town in the Marches, where the Museo Colloredo Mels houses four fine Lotto paintings.)
As an out-of-the-way alternative to London's lovely Wallace Collection, there's the Bowes Museum. Despite its large size, it is gem-like in the sense that it resembles an ornate jewel box chest stuffed full of treasures. The rural town of Barnard Castle in County Durham in the north of England is a surprising place to find an English version of a French chateau, but its founder John Bowes was a local aristocrat and MP, and a passionate Francophile. He married a Frenchwoman, Josephine, and commissioned a Frenchman to design a palace to house the very personal collection he and his wife created in the 1860s. French 18th- and 19th-century decorative arts and Spanish paintings lie at the heart of the collection.
Further details
La Piscine, Musée d'Art et d'Industrie de Roubaix
23 rue de l'Espérance, Roubaix
Open Tuesday-Sunday 11-6. Entry 3 euros
Musée d'Art Moderne Ceret
8, Bd Maréchal Joffre 66400
Open daily 15 June - 15 September 10 - 7; 16 September - 14 June 10 - 6. Closed on Tuesdays 1 October - 10 April Entry 5.5 euros
Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde
Prins Eugens väg 6, Djurgården, Stockholm
Open Tuesdays - Sundays 11 - 5 Thursday evenings until 8 Entry 80 SEK
Städtische Galerie Im Lenbachhaus
Luisenstraße 33 80333 München
Open Tuesday-Sunday 10 - 6. Entry 5-10 euros
Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal
Oude Singel 28-32, 2312 Leiden
Open Tuesday-Saturday 10-5. Entry 4 euros
Accademia Carrara
Piazza Giacomo Carrara
82 - 24121 Bergamo
Open Tuesday-Sunday 10 1 and 2.30 - 5.30. Entry 2.6 euros
Bowes Museum
Barnard Castle, County Durham
Open daily 10-5. Entry Adults: £7
© Caroline Bugler. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.