ティッセン=ボルネミッサ美術館

Madrid's art quarter is often called the Golden Triangle, and this museum is its third point, a short walk from the Prado and the Reina Sofía. Where those two are Spanish state collections built over centuries, the Thyssen-Bornemisza was assembled in two generations by one family. Baron Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, a German-Hungarian industrialist, started buying Old Masters between the wars, and his son Hans Heinrich carried it much further, adding Impressionists, Expressionists and American painting that European collectors then overlooked.

By the late 1980s the Baron was looking for a permanent home, and several countries competed to house the collection. Spain won, helped by his Spanish wife Carmen Cervera, and in 1993 the state bought around 775 works and installed them in the Palacio de Villahermosa, an early 19th-century mansion on the Paseo del Prado remodelled inside to hold them.

The pleasure of the place is its span. You can walk from 14th-century Italian gold-ground panels through Holbein, Caravaggio and Rubens into Monet and Van Gogh, and on to Kandinsky, Hopper and Lichtenstein, all under one roof. It fills the gaps the Prado leaves, which is why the three museums are usually visited as a set. Among its best-loved single works is Ghirlandaio's portrait of a young woman in profile, her red dress sharp against a dark ground.