Museum of the Ricardo do Espírito Santo Silva Foundation

The Ricardo do Espírito Santo Silva Foundation (FRESS), founded in 1953 by the banker and art collector Ricardo do Espírito Santo Silva, is an institution of great importance for the preservation and dissemination of Portuguese decorative arts. Located in the Palácio Azurara, an eighteenth-century building restored and classified as a Property of Public Interest, the foundation houses a vast art collection and 16 workshops dedicated to traditional Portuguese crafts. The Palácio Azurara, located in the picturesque Alfama district in Lisbon, recreates the atmosphere of an aristocratic house from the eighteenth century. Each room in the palace is a tribute to decorative arts, with original ceilings, azulejo panels, and antique furniture reflecting the evolution of taste and artistic techniques over the centuries. The foundation was created to preserve and promote decorative and artisanal arts, educating new generations through its Escola de Artes e Ofícios, which offers certified training courses in various disciplines.Ricardo do Espírito Santo Silva, born in 1900, was a passionate collector and patron of the arts. His vision was to gather and bring back to Portugal an artistic heritage that was at risk of being lost. He bought the Palácio Azurara in 1947 and exhibited part of his private collection there, consisting of furniture, textiles, silverware, paintings, and ceramics dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. His passion for decorative arts led him to create a foundation that would ensure the transmission of traditional artisanal knowledge to future generations.The FRESS collection is extraordinarily diverse and includes several thematic sections. Among the most relevant is the furniture collection, which with over 600 pieces offers a complete overview of the evolution of furniture from the late Renaissance to Neoclassicism. In particular, the works of Luso-Oriental production stand out, a testimony to the Portuguese presence on the eastern coast of Africa, in India, and in Japan. An emblematic example is an eighteenth-century gaming table, made with exotic materials such as pau-santo and pau-rosa, inlaid with ivory and silver.The foundation’s silverware collection is equally impressive, with about 250 pieces created by over 70 silversmiths active between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. These objects, mostly for civilian use, offer an important testimony to Portuguese craftsmanship, with pieces from Lisbon, Porto, Guimarães, Évora, and Rio de Janeiro. Equally fascinating is the section dedicated to ceramics, which includes Chinese porcelain from the Qing dynasty made on Portuguese commission, majolica from the production centers of Rato, Massarelos, and Miragaia, and azulejos panels. This core includes about 200 pieces documenting the evolution of ceramic techniques and decorative tastes between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.The sculpture collections, although smaller, offer a diversified overview of religious art, with stone or wooden images, ivory crucifixes, and terracotta nativity scenes. The Sala dos Presépios houses a small but significant collection of nativity scenes, further enriching the foundation’s artistic heritage.Painting is represented by about 90 works by Portuguese and foreign artists active in Portugal between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Among these are Gregório Lopes, Bento Coelho da Silveira, Vieira Lusitano, and Joaquim Marques, as well as painters like Dirk Stoop and Jean-Baptiste Pillement, who contributed to the Portuguese artistic panorama with their works.