
The story
One suite of rooms in the Dallas Museum of Art is a house that used to stand on the French Riviera. Emery Reves was the publisher who sold Winston Churchill's writing around the world, and his wife Wendy was a Texas-born former model. In 1953 the couple bought Villa La Pausa above Monte Carlo from the designer Coco Chanel, who had built it in the 1920s, and filled it with Impressionist paintings.
When Wendy gave the collection to Dallas, she asked that it not simply be hung on museum walls. So the architect Edward Larrabee Barnes rebuilt the villa's rooms inside the museum, the library, the salon, the courtyard, down to Chanel's own furniture, and set the pictures where the Reveses had lived with them.
Among them are canvases by Cézanne, Van Gogh, Renoir and Manet. The rest of the museum, one of the largest in the American South, is free to walk into, from ancient American gold to modern sculpture.
Collection
13 works
The IcebergsFrederic Edwin Church, 1861
Apollo and Diana Attacking the Children of NiobeJacques-Louis David, 1772
The Fountain of VaucluseThomas Cole, 1841
Fox in the SnowGustave Courbet, 1860
Le Pont NeufClaude Monet, 1873
St. JohnEl Greco, 1592
The Tea ServiceClaude Monet, 1872
Apple HarvestCamille Pissarro, 1888
Bonneville, SavoyJ. M. W. Turner, 1803
Sheaves of WheatVincent van Gogh, 1890
Young WomanAmedeo Modigliani, 1918
Murnau, Burggrabenstrasse 1Wassily Kandinsky, 1908
WindmillPiet Mondrian, 1917