Museus de Sitges collection

About the collection:

The Sitges Museums are a Museums cluster placed in a coastal town, 35 km South from Barcelona, where an important artists’ colony was developed in the 19th Century, around the Luminists School painters and the total artist Santiago Rusiñol and his friends, specially Ramon Casas and Miquel Utrillo. Painter, writer and collector, living in Paris, Rusiñol built his home there, the Cau Ferrat, between 1893 and 1894, and made it the cradle of Catalan Modernism movement. The Cau Ferrat has preserved its original aspect from 1931, when Rusiñol died and let the home and the collections to the Sitges population. It is open to the public since 1932, and has been renewed in 2014, by preserving the original crowded old style Museum. It shows paintings of Rusiñol and his friends, his collections of antiquities, pottery, glass and wrath iron, that gives name to the House. From 1909, the American millionaire and collector Charles Deering, a good friend of Ramon Casas, built the Maricel complex next to Cau Ferrat, under the direction of Miquel Utrillo. Maricel means “Sea and Sky” or “Sea and Heaven”, and this is the beautiful landscape seen from our windows and terraces. The project ended in 1923, when Deering came back to the USA with his collections. It is now divided in two parts: the Maricel Palace, where Deering showed his collections, is now used for Meetings and Activities; Directly over the Sea, the Maricel Museum shows a selection of artworks from the Dr. Pérez-Rosales and the Town’s Art Collections, from the Middle Age to the 20th Century. The Museu Romantic Can Llopis is a wealthy house from the end of the 18th Century and show how it was life in the 19th Century upper class. It hosts also a big and complete collection of Dolls and Toys from the artist and collector Lola Anglada. It is now closed for renovations and will be reopen in the next moths. The Stämpfli Contemporary Art Foundation shows a collection of Narrative Figuration artists linked to the Swiss Kinetic painter Peter Stämpfli. The Sitges Museums have uploaded at OWW about 200 paintings in a first artworks selection. We are planning how to use the game to organize online activities and contests, following our statutory Mission of expanding knowledge about the Sitges Heritage and the Arts in general. Many of our treasures, as the five Picasso or the two Anglada Camarasa, cannot be uploaded because rights issues. So you have to come to Sitges and visit us. You will find there a Town proud of Arts, Tolerance and Freedom.