
The story
On an island in the Meuse, in a park at the edge of Liege, stands a pale Louis XVI-style pavilion built for a world's fair. When Liege hosted its International Exposition in 1905, the architects Jean-Laurent Hasse and Charles Soubre put up this fine-arts palace among the temporary halls, and it was one of the few structures kept once the fair closed.
It reopened in 2016 as La Boverie, after the French architect Rudy Ricciotti grafted a long glass wing onto the old building and floated it out toward the water. Inside is the fine-arts collection of the city of Liege, European painting reaching back through the centuries, along with a large holding of prints and drawings shown in rotation.
Among its best-known paintings is Gauguin's Sorcerer of Hiva Oa, a late work he made in the Marquesas Islands in 1902, the year before he died there.
Collection
8 works
Bonaparte, First ConsulJean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1803
The Japanese ParisianAlfred Stevens, 1871
The Greeks and the Trojans Fighting over the Body of PatroclusAntoine Wiertz, 1836
Death and the MasksJames Ensor, 1897
Castle of ComblatPaul Signac, 1887
Le sorcier d'Hiva-OaPaul Gauguin, 1902
Light stripped of leavesJames Ensor, 1936
SeashellsJames Ensor, 1936