The House of Vlaho Bukovac

In Cavtat, a short way down the coast from Dubrovnik, stands the house where Vlaho Bukovac was born in 1855, the painter widely credited as the father of modern Croatian painting. It is a modest stone town house rather than a grand one, and its most remarkable contents stayed hidden inside the walls for the better part of a century.

From Cavtat to the Paris Salon

He was born Biagio Faggioni on 4 July 1855, to a Croatian mother and a family descended on the paternal side from an Italian sailor out of Genoa. At eleven he was taken to New York by his uncle Frano and stayed four years. He worked as a sailor on the Istanbul–Liverpool–Odessa run until an injury ended that career, went to Peru with his brother Jozo in 1873 and sold paintings there for a year, then moved on to San Francisco in 1874, where he studied under Domenico Tojetti. He returned to Europe in 1877 and adopted the surname Bukovac, a straight translation of the Italian faggio, beech.

In Paris he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel, backed financially by Bishop Josip Juraj Strossmayer and Medo Pucić. He exhibited at the Paris Salon, where the nude Une fleur of 1887 made his international name. In 1893 he settled in Zagreb, and the following year came Gundulić's Dream, built on Ivan Gundulić's epic Osman, which travelled to the Venice Biennale and sealed his reputation at home and abroad. He painted the curtain of the Croatian National Theatre in 1895, pushed for the construction of the Art Pavilion in the same year, and in 1897 founded the Society of Croatian Artists, urging painters outdoors and towards a lighter palette in the shift that produced what became known as the Colourful School of Zagreb. From 1903 he taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he died on 23 April 1922.

The House and Its Hidden Frescoes

The building is a turn-of-the-18th-century stone house with a garden at the side and a larger one behind, bought in the early 1800s by the painter's grandfather, a seaman named Giuseppe Fagioni. Bukovac added a storey above the west wing in 1898 and organised the top floor as his atelier, reached across a bridge structure; it now displays some of his later work.

The real surprise is in the older, eastern part of the house. At sixteen or seventeen Bukovac decorated its walls and ceilings himself with murals of exotic animals and landscapes. They were covered over and only came back to light during restoration work in the late 1990s, with conservation of the paintings beginning in 2003. The best of them is the room known as the Blue Room, where painted balustrades carry plant and animal motifs while the upper walls are filled with classical columns. His first self-portrait is displayed there as well.

How It Became a Museum

The house has been open to visitors, on and off, almost since the artist's death. His daughters converted the atelier into an exhibition space shortly after 1922. The Yugoslav Academy of Sciences and Arts acquired the property in the mid-1960s, and by 1976 it had passed to the Dubrovnik municipality through the Art Gallery of Dubrovnik. After the restoration campaign it reopened to the public in 2004 as part of the Museums and Galleries of Konavle.

The permanent holdings run to more than 200 paintings, drawings and sketches gathered from across his life in America and Europe, alongside private letters, a collection of photographs and the manuscript of his autobiography. Works by his daughters, who painted themselves, are shown too, together with examples of traditional Konavle embroidery.

Cavtat Around It

Cavtat sits roughly 18 kilometres southeast of Dubrovnik and is the main town of the Konavle region. It stands on ancient Epidaurum, a Greek and later Roman settlement whose inhabitants, driven out during the Avar and Slav attacks of the seventh century, are traditionally credited with founding Dubrovnik itself. The Rector's Palace on the waterfront holds the archaeological and cultural-history collection, and up on the cemetery hill is the Račić family mausoleum, completed in 1922 by Ivan Meštrović in white stone with carved angels and a pietà, run today by the same museum service as the Bukovac house.

It is a small museum and a quiet detour from the coast, best combined with a walk through Cavtat's old lanes, especially if you are already chartering a gulet from Dubrovnik and Cavtat happens to fall on the route.