Madrid - Palacio de Villahermosa

This nobleman's palace, built in the first half of the 19th C. by the architects Silvestre Pérez and Antonio López Aguado, impresses by its balanced proportions and simple elegance. In the 1970s the then owners, a financial institution, made radical changes to the interior of the building. The banking crisis of the late 1970s enabled the state to take over the Villahermosa palace as an annex to the nearby Prado Museum. From mid 1192 - initially for a ten-year period - the palace will display 787 paintings from the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection (from Lugano in Switzerland).

The pictures are arranged chronologically and according to schools on three storys. On the top floor the collection begins with works from the 13th to 17th C. On the first floor and on the ground floor there are works by artists from the 18th C. to the present day - a period hitherto not so well represented in Madrid's art galleries. The masterpieces on display include pictures by Duccio, van Eyck, Ghirlandaio, Carpaccio, Dürer, Cranach, Holbein, Caravaggio, Tiepolo, Huguet, Greco, Zurburán, Murillo, Goya, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Bonnard, Boecklin, Hodler, Derain, Matisse, Braque, Picasso, pictures by the Russian avant-garde and by groups of artists called "The Bridge" and "Blue Knights", as well as pictures by Doesburg, Mondrian, Dalí, Max Ernst, Magritte and Tanguy.