The story
Kārlis Padegs was 21, a Riga painter who liked to play the dandy in the city's streets, when he painted Madonna with Machine Gun in 1932. The title alone still makes visitors stop, and the picture is one of the best known in the Latvian National Museum of Art, the country's central collection of its own painting.
The building was made for the purpose. Designed by the Baltic German architect Wilhelm Neumann, who then ran the museum as its first director, it opened in 1905 and is counted as the first purpose-built museum in the Baltic states. The collection is older. It grew from pictures the Riga council bought from the collector Domenico de Robiani in 1866, shown to the public as the City Art Gallery from 1869. In the 1920s and 1930s the landscape painter Vilhelms Purvītis, then the director, set about building a collection of Latvian art, and his own Winter of 1910 hangs here today.
The same rooms follow a national school taking shape around 1900. Jānis Rozentāls painted Princess with a Monkey in 1913, and Jēkabs Kazaks painted Refugees in 1917, when the First World War had driven many Latvians from their homes. After a long reconstruction that added new halls underground, the museum reopened on 4 May 2016 with a fresh display of Latvian art.
