Dallas Museum of Art

Dallas Museum of Art

Dallas, United States · Website


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.

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Collection

13 works