Art Museum Riga Bourse
Latvia's museum of world art in the restored 19th-century stock exchange on Cathedral Square
The Art Museum Riga Bourse holds the Latvian national collection of foreign art and occupies the former Riga stock exchange on Cathedral Square. The building was designed by the St Petersburg architect Harald Julius von Bosse in a Venetian Renaissance manner and completed in the mid-1850s, its richly modelled facade unlike anything else in the medieval quarter. After serving various uses in the Soviet period and suffering a fire, it was restored between 2008 and 2011 and reopened as a museum, a branch of the Latvian National Museum of Art.
Displays run over several floors and take in ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman objects, Asian art from China, Japan and India, European painting from the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and France, and a gallery of works by Nicholas Roerich. Silverware and other precious holdings are shown inside the original neo-Gothic strongroom doors and safes kept from the exchange. A glazed atrium with a chandelier forms the central hall, and the museum also runs a changing programme of temporary exhibitions.
Highlights
- Venetian Renaissance revival facade of the 1850s stock exchange
- Collections of ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Asian art
- Silverware chamber inside the exchange's original safes
- Roerich gallery and European painting on the upper floors
