The story
The finest European paintings in the Caribbean hang in a small city on the south coast of Puerto Rico, and the reason is one man. Luis A. Ferre, an industrialist who later became the island's governor, built the Museo de Arte de Ponce around his own collection and opened it in 1965 in a building designed by Edward Durell Stone, with distinctive hexagonal galleries lit from the corners of their ceilings.
The picture everyone comes for is Frederic Leighton's 'Flaming June', a sleeping woman curled under a blaze of orange drapery, painted in 1895. Ferre bought it in the 1960s for a modest sum, when Victorian art was deeply unfashionable, and it has since become one of the most reproduced paintings in the world. Around it is a serious Pre-Raphaelite and Baroque collection.
When the building was closed for earthquake repairs in recent years, 'Flaming June' toured great museums abroad, and she now hangs again in Stone's honeycomb of galleries in the small city that owns her.
