Museum Le Mayeur

The Belgian painter Adrien-Jean Le Mayeur de Merprès (1880 to 1958) arrived in Bali in 1932, intending a short stay. In Sanur, then a quiet fishing village, he met Ni Pollok, a young legong dancer who became his model and, in 1935, his wife. They built a house of wood and thatch on the beach and filled its garden with flowers and stone carvings, and Ni Pollok and the women of the village appear again and again in his paintings: in the garden, weaving, dancing and bathing.

In the mid-1950s Indonesia’s minister of education and culture proposed turning the house into a museum, and Le Mayeur spent his last years adding work to it. It opened as a museum in 1957; he died in Belgium the following year.

The museum is the house itself, a traditional Balinese compound of pavilions with carved and painted doors, window shutters and pillars, set in a small garden a few steps from the beach path. Inside hang around 90 of Le Mayeur’s works in oil and watercolour, many of them on rough board, along with the couple’s furniture and household objects and photographs of Ni Pollok.

It is as interesting for its architecture as for the art, and gives a rare sense of how a foreign artist lived in Bali in the years before mass tourism. The museum is on the beachfront walkway in north Sanur, so it fits easily into a walk along the shore.