Another beautiful day of sightseeing around Vienna.
This time another Schloss, or Palace, which is a baroque masterpiece called Belvedere.
It is another summer palace, and it was built for Prince Eugene of Savoy. He was a very successful soldier who in later life was an obsessive collector of paintings.
Also mirroring our outing yesterday, we didn't go inside the palace, but just enjoyed the gardens.
Then to add a bit of culture, we went to the Albertina Gallery and actually paid to go inside.
The museum currently has a special exhibition of work by the famous pop artist, Roy Lichtenstein.
They were good fun and there was over 90 paintings on display.
In 2019 an unbelievably wealthy banker from Lichtenstein died at the age of 90, and bequeathed his collection of paintings to the Albertina.
His name was Herbert Batliner and he began collecting works of art from the 1950s. He gave over 500 paintings including lots by Monet, Picasso, Degas, etc. The list just goes on and on.
As we walked around the gallery we could guess which pictures used to be his as they were always the best ones.
The Batliner collection is worth an estimated 1 billion dollars, can you imagine how over the moon the Albertina staff would have been!
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