The story
Franz Mayer came to Mexico from Mannheim, in Germany, in 1905. He made his fortune as a financier and spent some 50 years collecting silver, painted pottery, furniture, textiles and books. He became a Mexican citizen in 1933, and in 1963 he set up a trust to keep the whole collection together for the country, which it inherited when he died in 1975.
The museum bearing his name opened in 1986 in the former hospital of San Juan de Dios, a colonial building beside the Alameda park in Mexico City's historic centre, restored for the purpose. Around its courtyard the rooms hold nearly 1,300 pieces of silver, many made for church use, such as chalices and censers, and one of the largest collections of Talavera from Puebla, the tin-glazed earthenware of central Mexico. The library keeps around 800 editions of Don Quixote.
The paintings are fewer, and some are first-rate. Jusepe de Ribera, the Spanish painter who settled in Naples, is represented by his Allegory of Sight, one of a series of the five senses he painted in Rome around 1615. Francisco de Zurbarán's Departure of Saint Peter Nolasco for Barcelona comes from the cycle he painted in the late 1620s for the Mercedarian friars of Seville.
