Museu Calouste Gulbenkian

The Lalique room, the largest collection of his jewellery anywhere

Calouste Gulbenkian took five per cent of Middle Eastern oil deals for arranging them, spent it on art for forty years, spent the war in neutral Lisbon and left everything to a Portuguese foundation. The museum opened in 1969 in a low modernist building in its own park, and it is the best small museum in Europe.

Six thousand years in about ninety minutes: Egyptian, Greek, Islamic, Armenian and Japanese objects, then European painting from Van der Weyden through Rembrandt and Rubens to Manet and Monet, then a room of Lalique jewellery he bought directly from the artist.