Juan Manuel Blanes Museum of Fine Arts
Municipal fine arts museum in a Prado villa, with Uruguay's only Japanese garden behind it.
The museum occupies an Italianate villa designed in 1870 by the engineer Juan Alberto Capurro for Dr Juan Bautista Raffo, standing beside the Miguelete stream in the Prado, the park district north of central Montevideo. The city bought the property, had it renovated and extended by the architect Eugenio Baroffio in 1929, and opened it in 1930, the centenary of the first Uruguayan constitution. It was named after Juan Manuel Blanes, the painter whose historical canvases shaped the country's image of its own past.
The collection centres on Blanes himself, with portraits, studies and large historical compositions, and continues through the generation that followed, among them Pedro Figari, Rafael Barradas, José Cúneo and Carlos González. Nineteenth and twentieth-century Uruguayan painting, drawing and sculpture fill the remaining rooms, alongside changing exhibitions of contemporary work. The house stands in a large park of old trees, and behind it lies a Japanese garden of some three thousand square metres, given by Japan in 2001 and laid out in the mountain-and-water manner.
Highlights
- Historical paintings and studies by Juan Manuel Blanes
- Works by Pedro Figari, Rafael Barradas and José Cúneo
- Italianate villa of 1870 by Juan Alberto Capurro
- Japanese garden given by Japan in 2001
