Art Study Tours

Barcelona attracted a number of unconventional artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their work may be encountered not just in museums and galleries but in the very streets of the city.

Gaudí’s incredible Sagrada Familia, like the Joan Miró Foundation, is a place where you walk actually within an art-work.

The Picasso Museum houses more than 3800 works from different periods of his life, while there are two museums specifically concentrating on a wider-ranging insight into modernism in its many forms:

MMCat has 350 works by 42 of the most representative modernista artists, including Joan Busquets, Ramón Casas, Antoni Gaudí, Gaspar Homar, Josep Llimona, Joaquim Mir and Puig i Cadafalch, in their different disciplines: painting, sculpture, furniture and the decorative arts; while MEAM houses, among many others, a unique collection of Art Deco.

If all this is not enough, then an hour or two from Barcelona is the town of Figueres, birthplace of Salvador Dalí and home of his Theatre Museum.  This is his magnum opus, conceived of and designed by the artist in order to offer visitors a genuine experience that would take them into his entrancing and unique world.

New to our programme, but already proving popular with Art teachers and their students, Berlin offers so many windows into different aspects of the subject.

You may take in modern and contemporary art, photography, expressionism, sculpture and even, if you wish, street art, with a tour of some recent offerings and a workshop session from which your students may take their work home.

For those with an interest in the Bauhaus, we propose a tour to Berlin, Dessau and Weimar.

If meeting the Flemish masters is your goal, then the towns and cities they knew first hand are the places to go.

The Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, the Groeninge Museum in Bruges and the Ghent Museum of Fine Arts together make up the Flemish Art Collection.  And while they cover the entire period from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, it is easy to construct a tour taking in only those periods which interest you.  

But it’s not just museums – the Cathedral of St Bavo in Gent is home to Rubens’ “Conversion of St Bavo” and the van Eyck brothers’ “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb”.

We recommend coach travel for this tour, or for smaller groups, rail conveniently connects the three cities.

Where better to discover the Renaissance than here in its spiritual home?

Our groups in Florence typically visit the Accademia, for Michelangelo’s David, the Bargello, with works by many of the masters of the period, and of course the Uffizi, Europe’s oldest museum, with its da Vincis, Botticellis and Lippis.

A walk through some of the churches of the city passes many frescoes, crossing the Ponte Vecchio to the cathedral with its magnificent Brunelleschi dome.

Our groups visiting Florence usually fly via Pisa, where the famous Leaning Tower is well worth a visit.

(If you can possibly find the time, the tour may be extended to such cities as Milan, Padua, Mantua and Venice)

Paris has almost too much to offer – we really have to concentrate on themes to offer a coherent visit and one thing that sets Paris apart from any other destination is the period of the Impressionists and post-Impressionists.

Our own favourite, the Orangerie, offers a fabulous concentration of masterpieces from the Jean Walter and Paul Guillaume Collection, a highly original insight into modern art featuring Cézanne, Renoir, Picasso, Rousseau, Matisse, Derain, Modigliani, Soutine, Utrillo and Laurencin.  And we haven’t mentioned Monet’s Water Lilies 

But this is only the start!

The Musée d’Orsay offers further works by the great Impressionists, while a short distance out of the city, you may visit Auvers-sur-Oise, where van Gogh spent his last days.  The church is instantly recognisable from his late works.  Nearby, in the Chateau d’Auvers, the exhibition “Journey to the Time of the Impressionists” neatly brings together the artistic and technical advances that fed the Movement.

Further relevant visits might include the Rodin, Picasso and Dali Museums, one or both of two vast Museums of Modern Art, or for a taste of earlier art movements, the Louvre.

Paris may be visited by coach, by train or by air.