Museo Nahim Isaías
Colonial art museum on Guayaquil's Plaza de la Administración, rich in Quito School work.
The Guayaquil banker Nahim Isaías Barquet began collecting viceregal art in the 1960s, concentrating on painting and sculpture of the Quito School. After his death in 1985 his family opened a museum in his name in 1990, in a corner building on the Plaza de la Administración in the heart of the city, among the seat of the governorate and the municipal palace. The museum later closed for a period and reopened on 30 September 2004 under public administration.
The holdings run to some 2,500 objects, chiefly colonial religious painting and polychrome sculpture from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, together with silver, furniture, books and nineteenth-century republican art. Displays set the works in the context of Guayaquil's history as a shipbuilding and trading port on the Guayas, and the museum runs temporary exhibitions, guided visits and education programmes as part of Ecuador's network of national museums and heritage repositories.
Highlights
- Around 2,500 works of colonial and republican art
- Painting and sculpture of the Quito School
- Collection formed by the banker Nahim Isaías Barquet
- On the Plaza de la Administración in central Guayaquil
