Bucharest Trip – Day 2 : Gallery of European Art

I visited this museum in February 2020 and wrote some of it up then, but I’ll come back to the artworks here later on (and repair some of the missing images in the oldest posts). In the meantime, a quick summary so that I can make progress on catching up the backlog of this blog. Susanna, Steve, Bev and I entered the gallery and showed our tickets we had obtained earlier on. Susanna had to wait for Thim to return as he had their tickets, which led to a highly suspicious security guard seemingly determined to think that Susanna was trying to get in for free. Susanna was guarded carefully for ten minutes by this security guard before Thim arrived, although I understand that when the ticket was produced the exchange become rather less frosty. Anyway, moving on.

There are world class artworks at the museum, although it isn’t as rich in quality and diversity of paintings as some other national museums. It also wasn’t particularly busy, but everything was well managed and orderly. I did think that the temperature in the galleries was a little hot, but I often think that. As another of my random asides, the photo above is of a staircase that it made me quite dizzy even looking over.

The collection of artworks was initially formed from the paintings owned by King Carol I (1839-1914) and they have been carefully adding items over recent decades. In terms of their most treasured pieces, they mention artworks by El Greco, Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, Auguste Rodin, Pieter Paul Rubens and Rodin.

Back to the staircase, I bravely looked over anyway.

It is rather beautiful…… It’s certainly worth a visit (the gallery I mean, not just the staircase) for anyone interested in European artworks and it’ll likely take an hour or two to walk around the collections.

As I mentioned, I’ll come back to surprise and delight my two loyal blog readers with my comments about some of the individual artworks, but for the moment I’ll limit myself to this post. After our visit, Steve and I decided to walk back, with the others spending a little longer at the gallery. Steve and I had planning to do on what pubs we needed to ensure we visited before the end of the week, we couldn’t spend all day looking at art.