Museums and Palaces

The Museu de Aguarela Roque Gameiro, located at Minde, is the only museum in this country devoted to watercolour, and more exactly to the work of the outstanding Portuguese watercolour painter – Alfredo Roque Gameiro.

In “Casa dos Açores”, a remarkable milestone of architecture and earlier twentieth-century gardens, linked to the painter’s family, the Centro de Artes e Ofícios Roque Gameiro (CAORG) - Centre of Arts and Crafts – host and owner of pieces belonging to the painter’s family and Centro de Arte Moderna – CAM (Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian) has set up the Watercolour Museum devoted to Roque Gameiro and the practice and study of that artistic subject.

The Casa dos Açores offers a high artistic and built-in quality (wherein innovative ideas by the time of Raul Lino, a close friend of Roque Gameiro, are echoing) which provides the best conditions for the targeted museum aims. The garden was excellently preserved and improved as well as the neo-moorish romantic wide tower standing in the opposite corner of the house.

The Museu de Aguarela Roque Gameiro was inaugurated in 2009, and its legacy is exclusively composed of drawings and watercolours, which implies for conservation reasons a shift of the pieces displayed. On the other hand, this enhances a renewed interest by the visitors to the museum.

In the work of Roque Gameiro there is an attitude of humility and reverence before the Creation, which is clearly understood throughout the smallest details, the tenderness at dealing with any stone, any tree, any water reflection, as if identifying with it. It is that strength stemming from humility and the respect towards the object, and mainly when the object of contemplation is a person, that some of the major moments of the Portuguese painting are achieved in his portraits – mainly the “Retrato de sua mãe”.