Casa Museu Jose Segrelles

实用信息

• Art museum
• Opening hoursVaries by day
• Under 1 kmfrom Albaida center
• Wheelchair accessrestroom
• Good for kids
• Restroom
• 4.9 / 549 reviews
• Albaida

The painter who illustrated the world

José Segrelles Albert (1885–1969) was born in Albaida, the third of twelve children, and as a boy already could not stop drawing. Trained in Valencia at the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts and the artisans' school—and shaped by contact with masters such as Joaquín Sorolla—he moved to Barcelona, where he made his name as a poster artist and illustrator, and was dubbed Catalonia's number-one poster-maker.↗↗↗

His real genius lay in illustration. Through contracts with The Illustrated London News and American magazines, he became, in the words of one scholar, 'a brilliant, unique and unrepeatable illustrator, number one of his era in Spain but also in the Anglo-Saxon world.' He also painted the very first poster for Valencia's Fallas festival in 1929 and won a Gold Medal at the Barcelona International Exposition that same year, before a celebrated stint in New York in the early 1930s.↗↗↗

Restless with reality and drawn to fantasy, Segrelles worked in a personal mix of orientalism, symbolism, magic realism and science fiction—watercolours of oriental scenes, dreamlike visions, and, later in life, bold 'sidereal' paintings of moons, nebulas and the cosmos. Contemporary film-makers, Guillermo del Toro among them, have looked to his phantasmagorical imagery for inspiration.

A house designed by the artist to show his own art

After living and working in Barcelona and New York, Segrelles chose to settle permanently in his native town in 1932 and, using designs made during his time in America, began building his house-museum in the early 1940s. The works were completed and the house inaugurated in 1943—where he lived and painted until his death on 3 March 1969, carefully selecting the originals that would represent every phase and style of his career.↗↗

In a generous touch typical of the man, he also opened a public library inside the house in April 1943, wanting to bring culture and knowledge within reach of his townspeople at a difficult time. Visiting, you get a sense not only of the art but of the artist's wish to make Albaida itself a cradle of creativity.↗↗

What you'll see inside

The Casa-Museum holds the most important anthology collection of Segrelles's work: so many originals that you can follow his entire artistic trajectory, from his earliest family portraits through to his posthumous oil 'Pentecost' (El Pentecostés), the crowning achievement of his mystical subjects. Around 200 works from all his periods are gathered here, out of an output estimated at more than 5,000 pieces.↗↗

Among the highlights are his book illustrations—the novels of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Dante's Divine Comedy, passages from Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, and visions drawn from Poe, Wells and Cervantes, including a depiction of one of the painter's own nightmares. Alongside these run fantasies on the human body's interior anatomy and his celebrated 'sidereal' astronomical themes, rounded off by major religious paintings.↗

The architecture is part of the experience: rooms Segrelles himself conceived—the Studio (Estudio), the Arab Room (Sala Árabe), the Rose Arch (Arco-Rosa) and an Audition Room (Sala de Audiciones)—frame the pictures, making the house read as a single, eccentric work of art in which the collection was meant to be lived with, not merely hung.↗

Beyond the museum: Segrelles's 'Sistine chapel' in Albaida

For the fullest picture of the artist, pair the museum with Albaida's main parish church, the Archpriestly church of the Assumption. Between 1961 and 1967, elderly but indefatigable, Segrelles painted fourteen monumental lunettes for the central nave, recreating miracles of Valencian saints and events tied to the town—an impact so vivid that locals call the ceiling his 'Sistine chapel'. One of these, the Miracle of Saint Louis Bertrán, has recently been restored.↗↗

In 2025, on the 140th anniversary of his birth, Albaida declared a 'Year Segrelles', filling the year with exhibitions, lectures, concerts and reissued illustrated editions devoted to the painter—a sign of how proudly this Valencian town has reclaimed its most fantastic son.↗↗

Planning your visit

The museum is a small, intimate house-museum, so expect a focused visit of well under an hour rather than a big gallery outing. It is officially recognised as a museum by the Generalitat Valenciana. Opening is limited to the mornings, and the museum and its staff advise requesting an appointment by phone before you go; afternoons are generally by pre-arranged visit only, and closed days and exact opening mornings can shift between the summer and winter seasons.↗↗↗

A standard adult ticket is around 4 euros. The house is on Plaça Pintor Segrelles in the centre of Albaida, a town in the Vall d'Albaida comarca roughly an hour's drive from Valencia city—worth combining the visit with a stroll through Albaida's old quarter and its palace of the Marquises.↗↗↗