The collection that makes up Puerto Rico’s Museo de Arte de Ponce was assembled by Luis A. Ferré, one of the most interesting men of his age. An industrialist and accomplished pianist, he was governor of Puerto Rico from 1969 to 1973 and he died in 2003, only a few months shy of his one hundredth birthday. Long before becoming governor, however, he acquired a love for visual art, especially European Old Master painting and nineteenth-century academic art; and out of what appears to have been the purest patriotic motives, he founded a museum to house his growing collection. This museum, which opened in 1959 in Ponce, the city of his birth, moved into its present building in 1965. Designed by the eminent American architect Edward Durell Stone, its modernist idiom recalls the same architect’s work at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, which opened six years later. In celebration of its fiftieth anniversary, the museum underwent an extensive expansion in 2010.
Now, as the Museo de Arte de Ponce undergoes additional repairs following the earthquakes of 2020, some of the finest works in the collection form a traveling exhibition titled The Sense of Beauty: Six Centuries of Painting from the Museo de Arte de Ponce, which opens first at the Meadows Museum of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, on February 23. Said to be the largest museum in the Caribbean, and surely one of the best, the Museo de Arte de Ponce is home to more than four thousand works of art. Among these are paintings by such northern masters as Lucas Cranach the Elder, Peter Paul Rubens, and Anthony van Dyck, a focus that underscores the role played by the art historian Julius S. Held, a renowned Rubens scholar, in the formation of the collection. In addition to such other Old Masters as Claude Lorrain and Joshua Reynolds, the museum has numerous works by such Spanish artists as Ribera, Goya, and Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida.
The museum is perhaps best known, however, for its extensive holdings of works by nineteenth-century academic and Pre-Raphaelite painters, among them Bouguereau, Gérôme, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Everett Millais. But perhaps its most famous work is Flaming June by Frederic Leighton, purchased by Ferré in the 1960s for about a hundred dollars at auction. At the time, few collectors were interested in nineteenth-century academic art, but now it is one of the best known and most often reproduced paintings in the world. It depicts a beautiful young woman dressed in saffron colored robes all’antica, as she reclines in a marble seat. The sea appears behind her in some ancient southern land. Presumably that land is Italy or Greece, but the subtropical plants beside her suggest that she is perfectly acclimated to her home in Ponce.
The Sense of Beauty: Six Centuries of Painting from the Museo de Arte de Ponce • Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Texas • February 23 to June 22 • meadowsmuseumdallas.org
