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Born in Vidalia, Georgia, Algur Hurtle Meadows (1899-1978) was the founder of the General American Oil Company. Meadows travelled to Spain for business reasons in the 1950s, spending lengthy periods in Madrid. As a result of his numerous visits to the Museo del Prado, which was just near his hotel, and the enormous interest which he developed in seventeenth-century Spanish painting, Meadows decided to build up his own collection of Spanish art. His first acquisitions were of works from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: later he broadened the chronological scope of the collection to include works from the fourteenth to the twentieth centuries. The new museum, founded in memory of his first wife, Virginia Garrison Stuart (1901-1961), reflected Meadows’s desire to establish a museum of Spanish art in Texas. In 1967, with the help of William B. Jordan, the collection was revised and refined while new works of indisputable quality were added to it. Algur H. Meadows took an active part in this process of revision and acquisition which still continues today The Meadows Museum and its collection of Spanish art The Meadows Museum opened to the public in 1965 following a financial endowment by Algur H. Meadows made in 1962. The new institution was set up in the Southern Methodist University of Dallas (Texas) and housed in the university’s School of Arts building. Today the Meadows Museum comprises 600 works of art including a magnificent group of paintings and sculptures and a large body of works on paper which has expanded with new acquisitions over the years. This splendid collection allows for a complete study of Spanish art from the Midddle Ages to the present, and is considered one of the most complete outside Spain: for this reason it is known as "The Prado on the Prairie". For the present exhibition the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum has chosen twenty-seven paintings by twenty leading Spanish artists. Works from Fernando Gallego to Picasso will be on show in room 6, together with examples by Luis de Morales, Velázquez, Murillo and Goya. This represenative selection is no more than a rich sample of the Spanish works of art which make up the Meadows Museum in Dallas.
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