“Beauty will be worshipped [here] with no other objective than to elevate the spirit and sharpen inspiration,” said Luis A. Ferré in 1964, when he laid the cornerstone for the new building: the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico.
Ferré (1904–2003), a prominent industrialist, politician, and governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (1969–1973), said that establishing the museum in 1959 was “the biggest project I’ve undertaken in my life.” He had the museum built in the southern city of Ponce, his birthplace and where he established his businesses.
Ferré acquired the art collection under the guidance of American Julius S. Held (1905–2002), an art historian, a professor at Columbia University’s Barnard College, and a renowned expert of Dutch and Flemish art.
Museo de Arte de Ponce in America
“The Sense of Beauty: Six Centuries of Painting From Museo de Arte de Ponce” exhibition, at the Meadows Museum in Dallas, showcases the Puerto Rican collection of European, American, and Puerto Rican art through 60 artworks.The Museo de Arte de Ponce collection consists of over 4,500 objects and artworks from the 16th century to the 21st century.
According to the exhibition catalog, the museum holds “one of the most important collections of European Baroque art outside Europe” and “the most complete collection of Victorian art outside the United Kingdom.”
Among the exhibition artworks are religious paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder (circa 1472–1553), Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), and Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641); history and mythical paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807); portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) and Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842); landscapes by Claude Lorrain (circa 1600–1682) and Frederic Edwin Church (1826–1900); and genre scenes by James Tissot (1836–1902) and William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905).
Exhibition highlights include Rubens’s “Head of the Oldest of the Three Kings” and Puerto Rican artist José Campeche y Jordán’s (1751–1809) devotional paintings. There are also two polychromed wood sculptures by Spanish sculptors Pedro de Mena (1628–1688) and José de Mora (1642–1724) that are exclusively on display at the Meadows.
Cultivating Culture
Ferré wanted Puerto Ricans to develop their “aesthetic sense,” which he felt was needed for a full and peaceful life.When laying the cornerstone for the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ferré underscored the importance of cultivating “‘a sense of beauty” every day:
“This way of life, with a sense of beauty serving as a daily norm, is the only thing that can give quality to the civilization of abundance that today’s technological progress has made available to us. Only in this way will we be able to avoid the sense of frustration resulting from the satisfaction of material appetites without the parallel cultivation of the ethical, aesthetic, and religious values that give meaning to life and peace and tranquility to the spirit.”
He added: “And we remembered with great pain that, in our Puerto Rico, where nature had been so generous in beauty, the hand of man had contributed very little to highlight that beauty, spoiling, on the contrary, on many occasions, the beauty of the natural panorama with works that could be called scars.” These “scars” that Ferré referred to may have been the country’s recent influx of modernist architecture.
The European Art Tradition
Ferré’s idea for the art collection came after he first visited Europe in 1950. He saw that even remote villages had “magnificent works of art preserved in beautiful buildings that the genius of each nation had created for its spiritual delight.”
He noted how the Italian Renaissance took inspiration from ancient Greek art, and generations of artists thereafter took inspiration from Renaissance art.
Held and Ferré
The exhibition and its catalog give a fascinating insight into Ferré’s fruitful partnership with American art historian Held and the acquisition process. The pair acquired 50 percent of the paintings in the museum today, including 43 of the 60 paintings on display in the exhibition.
Held visited New York galleries and auction houses and sent Ferré recommendations. In one of the many letters between the pair, Held stressed that the quality of the painting was “the only thing that matters. … I'd much rather buy a picture of quality, than a poor picture by a great name. After all, we admire a work of art for what it is in itself.”
A Flemish Master
Rubens’s friend, the director of the prestigious Plantin-Moretus printing house, Balthasar Moretus (1574–1641) commissioned Rubens to paint the king who, according to the catalog “arrived from Greece” and gifted gold to the newborn Christ.Rubens replicated the painting in his “Adoration of the Magi” for St. John’s Church in Mechelen, Belgium.
The exhibition catalog lauds Rubens’s “exquisite detail and minimal brushwork” in his rendering of the fur-lined damask silk cloak and the different textures of hair and skin.
Hanging beside Rubens’s work is van Dyck’s painting of St. Andrew. Van Dyck once worked in Rubens’s studio. His expressive rendering of the saint has a feeling similar to the head of the king.
Van Dyck gained worldwide acclaim for his portraits of English aristocrats, but he also had a prodigious output of devotional works like this early work of St. Andrew.
Puerto Rican Masters
Puerto Rican paintings make up around 30 percent of the current collection, including works by the first official Puerto Rican painter, José Campeche y Jordán.One of Campeche’s earliest works, “Saint Joseph and the Christ Child” was influenced by the luminous works of Spanish painter Luis Paret y Alcázar (1746–1799), who the Spanish crown exiled to Puerto Rico between 1775 and 1778. According to the exhibition catalog, the Spanish artist inspired Campeche to render expressive facial features and add dynamic touches of light to make a robe voluminous, and a rose-tinted tropical sky in heaven.
Beauty Benefits Humanity
Opening the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Ferré said: “Here, culture will be made with universal harmonies, but with Puerto Rican notes.” He based the collection on universal beauty, hoping that it would bring museum visitors “peace and harmony as though they were standing in the entrance hall of Paradise.”He also knew the transcendent nature of pure beauty: “The “contemplation of beauty in art stimulates the purest sentiments in human beings, so much so that we might say that beauty is life’s very raison d'être. Once you experience the pleasure of beauty, one seeks out harmony and understanding in every other [manifestation] of life.”
