Maricel Museum

The palace is still here. The collection it was built to hold is not. Charles Deering spent a decade turning a seafront hospital into a museum for one of the great private collections of Hispanic art — then fell out with the man who built it for him, and in 1921 shipped most of the art back to the United States. What visitors see today is a masterpiece of a building filled with an entirely different collection.

An American magnate and his Catalan architect

Charles Deering (1852–1927), heir to a Chicago farm-machinery fortune, came to Sitges in 1909 in the company of the painters Ramon Casas and Miquel Utrillo. He stayed. Between 1910 and 1918 Utrillo — an engineer and artist rather than a conventional architect — rebuilt the old Sant Joan quarter’s seafront hospital and the buildings around it into Maricel, one of the most complete surviving statements of Catalan Noucentisme. Deering lived there and filled it with Hispanic art assembled largely by Utrillo on his behalf: Gothic panels, sculpture, decorative arts, and painting attributed to names including El Greco and Goya.

The walls are made of other buildings

Look closely at the stonework and the sense of a house built from fragments is not an illusion. Architectural elements throughout Maricel were lifted from Peninsular buildings that no longer exist, many of them dispersed after the nineteenth-century Desamortización de Mendizábal broke up monastic property across Spain. Doorways, capitals and window frames from vanished churches and convents were set into new walls. It is a technique the town knew well: the neighbouring Santiago Rusiñol’s iron-filled house-museum had already done the same thing two decades earlier with windows from Sitges’s demolished castle.

What happened in 1921

Deering’s relationship with Utrillo broke down. In 1921 he left Sitges and removed the collection, taking most of it to the United States; the pieces are now scattered across international museums and private hands. The building passed through other uses until Barcelona’s Provincial Council bought it in 1969, installed the art collection donated by Dr Jesús Pérez-Rosales, and reopened it as a museum in 1970. Today’s holdings run from Romanesque through to twentieth-century Noucentisme, including Ramon Casas’s portrait of Deering himself — the collector left behind in the house he emptied. Since 2012 the complex has been progressively reunified, and a digital reconstruction now lets visitors see the vanished Golden Hall as it looked between 1915 and 1918.

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