So far every locality we have visited has yielded a hidden gem –a museum, cathedral, garden, plaza, neighborhood, or other attraction that wasn’t on our radar but which provided a nice surprise. Madrid is the largest, most diverse place we’ve visited, and for the time we’ve had here, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza has been that gem.

Yes, another art museum.

The Thyssen is small but it has a marvelous collection of impressionist and modern paintings. Rick Steves describes it as having masterpieces of minor artists and minor pieces of masters. To a large extent that’s true. Picasso, Degas, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Miró, Braques, Kandinsky, Chagall, Delacroix, Goya, and others are represented here, but probably not by works that you’ll see in art history books. On the other hand, it’s a treat to see early works by the masters and compare them to known works. (For example, there are several works by Gaugin, but I would not have attributed any of them to him. He was kind of a French pointillist guy when he started out.)

My new favorite artist Juan Gris was well represented by early works from his cubist phase. Edvard Munch has a well-crafted non-Scream painting in the collection. And there were a few artists that I need to look up.

Some photos and titles. Many of the photos have glass reflections on them that I couldn’t avoid. Sorry ’bout dat.