Galerij-Museum-Bies

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• Museum
• Under 1 kmfrom Aarle-Rixtel center
• 4.7 / 57 reviews
• Aarle-Rixtel

A family of painters on the edge of the Peel

Marinus Bies was one of those artists so bound to a single stretch of land that his work reads like a portrait of the region itself. For most of his career he painted the Peel — the broad, sandy and once-waterlogged landscape that lies across the northeast of North Brabant, between Eindhoven, Helmond and the Maas. When he moved his family into the new house at Bosscheweg 15 in 1930, the building became his studio, his address and, eventually, a permanent home for his pictures.↗

The house sits roughly fifteen kilometres northeast of Eindhoven and just four kilometres north of Helmond, in a quiet, flat and open part of the province where the land Marinus painted is still easy to find. There is no grand facade and no museum signage to prepare you for the interior; what you arrive at is, in the truest sense, a family house that happens to hold a century of paintings.↗↗

Built around daylight

What makes the gallery unusual among Brabant's small art spaces is how deliberately it was designed. The two wings Henk Bies added in 1979 and 1992 were planned specifically as painting rooms, arranged so that almost all the works on view can be seen in natural daylight rather than under electric lamps. The effect is quietly restorative: colours look as the painters mixed them, and the canvas textures read honestly.↗

Inside you move between three purposes under one roof: a museum collection of works the family keeps and never sells, a large sales collection for those hoping to take a painting home, and — set to one side — the active painting and restoration atelier that has existed since the gallery's earliest days. The breadth of the trading collection means a single visit can sweep from an intimate Peel landscape by the founder to twentieth- and twenty-first-century works by artists of the wider region.↗↗

The painters you'll meet on the walls

The collection is anchored in Brabant painting of the last century. Alongside the three Bies generations — Marinus, Henk and Marc — the gallery shows work by a roster of regional names: Peter van den Braken, Jaap de Carpentier, the Tilburg painter Richard van Dijk (who died in 2008), Hendrik de Laat, Frans Manders, Herman Moerkerk, Theodorus van Oorschot, Jacques Pijnenborg, Adrianus Sibens, Jan Vinks and Martin Roestenburg, with artists from outside the province and even abroad also represented. It is a good place to discover the breadth of what Brabant's twentieth-century painters were up to beyond the most famous household names.↗↗

The current centrepiece for visitors is "Geworteld in de Peel" ("Rooted in the Peel"), a retrospective of Marinus Bies mounted for the fiftieth anniversary of his death, covering the years 1894 to 1975. It is accompanied by a substantial new book on the painter — "Geschilderd epos van de Peel" (A Painted Epic of the Peel) — written by the art historians Dr Ger Jacobs and Drs Peter Thoben together with Peel historian Hans van de Laarschot, a 220-page hardback that gives the founder's life work its due.↗↗

Getting there and around the visit

Galerij-Museum Bies is a make-an-appointment kind of place, and that is part of its charm. During the exhibition the doors are open Thursday to Sunday from 13:00 to 16:00, but in the winter period the gallery is open by appointment only, so a phone call ahead is strongly advised. There is no ticket desk and no queue — you are received by the people who actually know the pictures and the painters, and visitors regularly praise how friendly, knowledgeable and unhurried the experience is.↗↗

If you have a painting of your own — an inherited landscape, a damaged canvas you love — the in-house restoration atelier is a genuine asset, specialising in the careful cleaning, conservation and repair of paintings. The family's dual expertise as painter and restorer means the same people who hang the walls are also the ones who can talk you through a treatment, and visitors report being very satisfied with the cleaning and restoration work carried out here.↗↗

Because the gallery is so closely tied to the land it depicts, a visit pairs naturally with a drive or cycle through the surrounding Peel countryside to the north and east, where the open farmland, heath edges and flat horizons still echo the canvases on the walls. For anyone with an interest in Dutch regional painting or in the rare pleasure of seeing art in daylight, this tucked-away family museum rewards the detour from Eindhoven or Helmond.