Ponce Art Museum

The Museo de Arte de Ponce is one of the finest art museums in the Caribbean, housed in a striking hexagonal building designed by Edward Durell Stone and opened in 1965. The permanent collection spans five centuries, from sixteenth-century European Old Masters to twentieth-century Puerto Rican painting, and is particularly strong in Baroque and Pre-Raphaelite work. The Flaming June by Lord Leighton, perhaps the most reproduced painting in the collection, is here — an almost impossibly vibrant image that justifies the journey on its own.

The Puerto Rican collection on the upper floor deserves equal attention. It traces local painting from the Spanish colonial period through the independence movement to the present, and includes major works by Francisco Oller, the island's most celebrated nineteenth-century painter and a friend of Cézanne. The museum is well-curated, with clear English-language explanations alongside the Spanish, and it is large enough to feel substantial without being exhausting. Allow two to three hours.

things to do museum
A story
The museum was the vision of Luis A. Ferré, an industrialist and future governor of Puerto Rico, who wanted to give the island a world-class art collection. He hired Edward Durell Stone — the architect behind the Museum of Modern Art in New York — to design the building, and spent decades personally acquiring works from European auctions. The result is a collection that holds its own against major North American museums, anchored by a Baroque European gallery that includes works by Velázquez and Rubens, and a Pre-Raphaelite collection that is among the finest outside Britain.

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