Lisbon: Calouste Gulbenkian Museum

The last place I visited during my trip to Lisbon was the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, founded in 1969 to house the enormous art collection that belonged to Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian.

Calouste Gulbenkian was an obscenely rich businessman born in Constantinople in 1869. Over the years he amassed a massive collection of around 6,400 artworks dating from the Egyptian and Greco-Roman period to the early 20th century.

When he died in 1955, he left his collection to the city of Lisbon on condition it built a museum to house it.

The museum was constructed in the mid-1960s in the city’s Parque de Santa Gertrudes and around 1,000 of Gulbenkian’s artworks are on permanent display.

The building has won a number of architectural awards, but if I’m honest I wasn’t too keen on it. It’s very late 1960s/early 1970s with lots of beige and brown, which I found quite ugly.

Inside, the museum is split into different sections and the first part I visited housed ancient works from Egypt, the Greco-Roman empire and Mesopotamia.

There were also tiles, rugs and various other objects from Persia and Turkey, as well as some lovely pieces of porcelain and silks from China.

There was a lot to look at and it was fascinating to see so many varying pieces in such close proximity.

I then wandered over to the section on European art. This part of the gallery is home to a magnificent bust of Victor Hugo by Rodin, a portrait of Madame Claude Monet by Renoir in which she looks wonderfully French, as well as paintings by Nanette, Gainsborough and Turner.

The standout part of the gallery was the room dedicated to René Lalique. Gulbenkian amassed one of the world’s greatest collections of objects by Lalique and the pieces on display are incredible.

There were beautiful glass goblets, dazzling vases, and delicate hair accessories and broaches. Everything was so elegant and pretty, I spent ages looking at it all.

Gulbenkian’s art collection is home to some exquisite works of art so I enjoyed my visit. It’s rare to see such a huge breadth of pieces from so many different eras and parts of the globe in such a small space.

The gallery was also quite quiet as it’s away from the Lisbon tourist trail, so I was able to take my time looking around the collection. The only downside was the miserable staff, but the fabulous artworks more than made up for it. If you like art, it’s worth a visit.