A little more
of Aarle-Rixtel.

Aarle-Rixtel · NL

Galerij-Museum-Bies

In a brick house on a country lane just north of Helmond, three generations of the Bies family have been painting, selling and conserving the art of the Dutch Peel landscape since 1930. Galerij-Museum Bies began as the home and studio of the painter Marinus Bies (1894–1975) and has grown into an unusual hybrid: a working atelier, a museum of a family's life's work and a gallery devoted to Brabant painters of the twentieth century. It is small, personal and almost entirely lit by daylight. The story here is as much about continuity as about the pictures themselves. Marinus settled at Bosscheweg 15 with his family in 1930; his youngest son Henk, also a painter, took over the house in 1972 and added two gallery wings, dedicating one room as a museum to his father. In 2006 Henk's son Marc — trained as a painter and a restorer, and long active as an art dealer — inherited the place. Walking through it, you sense a single family line quietly shaping a corner of Brabant art for nearly a century. It suits a traveller who likes art seen at its best — without spotlights, crowds or ticket queues — and who enjoys the regional painters whose subjects still ring true across the sandy Peel countryside on the doorstep.