THE HOUSE MUSEUM AS ANCIENT GREEK PALACE: Travelling Through Time and Space at the Villa Kérylos with Bertrand Bourgeois

This talk will consider the Villa Kérylos, a house-museum on the French Riviera created in the ‘Belle Epoque’ and conceived by its owner (the banker Théodore Reinach) to be a reconstitution of an ancient Greek palace. It will show how both the architecture and the artefacts collected express the passion of an individual collector as well as allowing the visitor to travel through space and time.

Bertrand Bourgeois is a lecturer at The University of Melbourne and is an expert in house-museums, having written a book entitled Poétique de la maison-musée (1847-1898) (Paris, L’Harmattan, 2007) focusing on real and fictional 19th century French house-museums.

The bedroom of Madame Reinach at Villa Kérylos