Museum of Fine Arts of Seville
Spanish painting from the Gothic to the early twentieth century, in a former Mercedarian convent.
The museum occupies the former Convent of the Merced Calzada, founded after the Christian conquest of Seville and rebuilt between 1602 and 1612 to designs by Juan de Oviedo y de la Bandera. After the ecclesiastical confiscations of the 1830s the building was assigned to a new provincial museum, which opened to the public in 1841 with paintings gathered from suppressed monasteries across the province. Further works in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reshaped the facade onto the Plaza del Museo and adapted the church as the principal display hall.
The collection is arranged chronologically through fourteen rooms around three courtyards. It is particularly strong in the Sevillian Golden Age, with large holdings of Murillo, Zurbaran and Valdes Leal, together with works by El Greco, Velazquez, Pacheco and Lucas Cranach the Elder. Later rooms cover Romantic and Realist painting and Sevillian artists of the early twentieth century such as Gonzalo Bilbao. The former conventual church, with its Baroque vault paintings by Domingo Martinez, is among the museum's most striking spaces.
Highlights
- Former Mercedarian convent church used as the main painting gallery
- One of the largest collections of Murillo anywhere
- Zurbaran's monastic canvases from suppressed Andalusian houses
- Three tiled Renaissance courtyards, including the Claustro del Aljibe
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