Madrid - is the Thyseen museum the world's best art collection.

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we went off to the Museo Thyssen, which shows off the collection of the Thyssen family of German/Hungarian industrialists who ended up selling their one Billion dollar collection of art to Spain for a mere $350 million a few years ago. The last Baroness Thyssen-Bornemisza described the sale as giving the public a chance to share in the beauty of the collection she and her husband, the late Baron had so much joy in collecting. She doesn't mention the family squabble over the will which may have assisted her in making the decision to share all that beauty!

And it is an Amazing art collection, ranging from Dutch masters up through Van Gogh and Picasso. Hint: if you are going to go, buy the tickets online and save yourself a wait "in line". It was fifteen minutes when we lined up and half an hour by the time we got our tickets as tourists poured in.

The museum is so big that the crowds disappeared into it and it felt very open. We bought a combo ticket good for a year for this place, the Prado and the museum where "Guernica" lives. It is less than the three separate single entry tickets added together.

We were there for 90 minutes and could only see a quarter of the rooms. Wow. They had everything: here's me with a Piet Mondrian. But the gem was a Frans Hals portrait of "Fisherman with a Violin". the details of his face are amazing, making all of the other portraits we saw look like preliminary sketches - and those included Gainsborough and Sargent and Reynolds. No flash photography allowed, of course, so I thought I would try a quick one without just to see what happened. In that dim corner, the camera insisted on an exposure of a fifth of a second, usually long enough to produce a blurred mess like my other photos which have mush shorter exposure times.

It turned out perfectly. It's the best I have ever taken. And I can't share it with you over a commercial sight. That' s how good it is. If you would like to see it, let me know and I will email it to you separately.

Instead, you get me getting perpendicular with my buddy, Piet. Damned copyright laws!

Stay tuned for more on the Thyssens! It's quite a story!

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Comments

[Brenda]

Art photos
Any art photos, please send to Robyn ([e-mail]) - she will appreciate them.