Museum of National Art

Yesterday we had a brief look at Sitges before driving up to our camp site on the northern outskirts of Barcelona.

Sitges

Sitges beach

Cathedral on the beach.

While the camp site is about 40 km out of Barcelona it is a great spot ( at $100 per night ) with convenient bus services to Barcelona and the local town and beach. Today we had a look at a few of the museums Barcelona has to offer. The first was the Music Museum with a collection of over 1000 instruments spanning 2500 years. This was a brilliant and totally fascinating museum, very well presented. My only gripe is that most of the instruments were behind glass and difficult to photograph. But given the age and heritage of these instruments I can totally forgive them.

Some toy gramophones.

The Hauslaib Clavioganum

Pipe Organ

Bellows for the pipe organ

Lute

Viola de roda, 1866

A walking stick violin. Apparently Oscar Wilde owned one.

The centre one is a glass Orpheus

Giraffe piano

A type of bagpipes I think.

The crystal trombone.

It is played by stroking wet fingers over the pipes, hence the water glass.

A Buccen

A fabulous exhibition. There is so much more I haven’t shown and it will have to wait till you go to Barcelona.

Our next museum was the highly anticipated Picasso. Unfortunately this did not live up to expectations. The museum was great at explaining in great detail Picasso’s life work, his methodology, his style variations and other scholarly information. However it displayed much of his minor work and sketches and not much of the work he became famous for.

The Old Fisherman. We saw the full portrait in Monserrat.

The old building the exhibition was housed in was quite spectacular.

Some caricature work.

Some Picasso pottery.

Shoes, any and every colour you might want.

Next was the Joan Miro museum, a Spanish painter and sculptor. Again underwhelming for much the same reasons as Picasso. Too much fluff in the descriptions with all his best work in other museums around the world.

Collette trying to ‘feel’ the space.

An extremely large piece of fabric art.

The BS finally got to me. See if this moves you to shudder with anticipation.

And here it is!!!!!!!

Hope you are inspired.

And finally a lesson on building a retaining wall.

The views from the museum were incredible.

The cathedral. We have tickets for Saturday.

We walked back towards town via the National Museum of Art of Catalan.

Built for the 1929 World Expo.

Another for the Expo, this one with Gaudi’s influence.

Tomorrow some more exploring but also some shopping.

David & Collette