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The Directory › Europe › Spain › Madrid
Plate II · xi · a · The City

Madrid

Two houses, ten minutes apart, holding entirely opposite opinions about how much a room should contain.

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A quiet Madrid street of nineteenth-century apartment facades in low grey winter light, wet stone and bare trees
Plate II · xi · a · Chamberí, in winter

Everyone arrives in this city with three great galleries on a list, and leaves remembering a garden gate on a side street.

A day, properly arranged
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Not a Monday. And not between two and four, whatever the internet tells you.

The entries

Two entries, both visited, and no argument between them worth settling.
An empty painter's studio in a nineteenth-century house: tall curtained window, easel, worn floor and hung canvases in low grey daylight
Interior · The studio, mid-morning

A studio kept as a working room rather than a shrine tells you the one thing a catalogue cannot: where the man chose to stand.

WINTER, BEFORE NOON
Notes for Madrid

Sorolla first, and early. The garden is the entrance and it sets the temperature of everything that follows; arrive with a queue behind you and you will walk through it instead of standing in it.

Cerralbo asks for the opposite frame of mind. It is a house with no restraint whatsoever, and the trick is to stop trying to see everything and pick one cabinet — the glass, in my case — and give it ten honest minutes.

The two are a short taxi apart and a long, pleasant walk apart. The great galleries are elsewhere in the city and will happily eat the rest of the week; keep this one day for the houses and do not let the Prado bully it.

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