The Leventis Gallery, the art museum Cyprus was missing

Cyprus has archaeology to spare, but until 2014 anyone wanting to see great European painting had to leave the island. The gallery says as much itself. Here’s what it holds, what it costs and why I think it’s one of Nicosia’s surprises, using the gallery’s and the municipality’s information.

The legacy of a Troodos villager

Anastasios G. Leventis was born in December 1902 in Lemythou, a Troodos village, worked in Marseilles, studied commerce in Bordeaux and built one of Nigeria’s largest businesses in West Africa. He collected art all his life and wanted his treasures shown to his compatriots. The foundation bearing his name held an international architectural competition, building began in 2011 and the gallery opened in 2014 in a new building in the centre.

Four collections

The headline one is the Paris Collection, named after Leventis’s Paris flat, where it hung for more than 50 years. It covers European art from the 17th to the 20th century, and the municipality names El Greco, Murillo, Boucher, Fragonard, Canaletto, Guardi, Gainsborough, Corot, Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Signac and Chagall. The wood-panelled room from that flat has even been rebuilt inside the gallery, with Louis XV and Louis XVI furniture and porcelain.

The Greek Collection has more than 260 works, from the 1821 War of Independence to around 1970. The Cypriot one focuses on the island’s first generation of painters, born between 1884 and 1930, and its centrepiece is «The World of Cyprus» by Adamantios Diamantis, a canvas 1.75 by 17.5 metres based on 75 drawings made between 1931 and 1959. There’s a Gold Collection too.

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Hours and tickets

It’s shut on Mondays and Tuesdays; otherwise its day runs from 10 am to 5 pm, except on Wednesdays, when it stays open until 20:00. Standard entry is €5, or €7 with an audio guide. The €3 reduced ticket is for over-65s and students aged 18 to 26 with ID, and for groups of ten or more. Under-18s go free, as do disabled visitors and a companion. There’s a café, lifts to every floor and a basement car park.

What I like about the Greek rooms

The Greek Collection fills two rooms. The first, «From the 19th Century to the 20th», covers painting in independent Greece, with society portraits, works by the Munich School and compositions by Periklis Pantazis. The second, «The 20th Century», brings together Konstantinos Parthenis, Konstantinos Maleas and Spyros Papaloukas and the younger names who shaped the century, such as Yannis Tsarouchis, Nikos Hatzikyriakos-Ghika and Yannis Moralis, through to abstraction. The municipality explains that the core of the collection was bought by Leventis in 1973 from Evangelos Averoff-Tossizza. It’s the least known part and the one that surprises British visitors most, who arrive thinking of Canaletto and Gainsborough and leave discovering Tsarouchis.

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Fitting it in

I’d make it day two in the capital, after the Leventis Museum in Nicosia, which belongs to the same foundation but tells the city’s story. A Wednesday evening is the best slot, as it’s open until 20:00. Allow an hour and a half, and if you’re short of time, head straight for the Paris Collection and the Diamantis frieze. The other museums, with their hours, are in museums in Nicosia.

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