A decade ago Madrid was a great place to get traditional cuisine if offal stew and suckling pig was what you were after. Everything was done by hand, the craftsmen working according to the templates - known as cartoons - created by draftsmen and court artists. On the same street were two of the greatest art galleries in the world: the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, the modern art collection which had opened in 1988, and the Museo del Prado.. Madrid's Real F?ica de Tapices - the Royal Tapestry Factory - is not so much an industrial plant as an artists' studio. Even in the 21st century, everything is done by hand, continuing a tradition that was established in Madrid nearly 400 years ago The factory was founded in 1721 by Felipe V. He may have got the idea from his grandfather, the French king Louis XIV: tapestry workshops had existed in France for 100 years.
Felipe recruited a Flemish weaver from Antwerp, Jacob Vandergoten, who moved to Madrid with his family and began making tapestries. The contents of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum are widely regarded as the greatest private art collection in the world. But when the museum opened in Madrid in 1992, it wasn't exactly bringing painting to a city deprived of art. This is a portrait of Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, and it hangs on the ground floor of his own museum. The baron took over the collection begun by his father in the 1920s, and added to it until it became too large to display in his own home in Switzerland. Searching Europe for suitable premises, he was offered the Palacio de Villahermosa, a 19th-century palace that happened to be empty and ready for conversion.
Out of thousands of works of art on display in Madrid, the Lucien Freud portrait of a German-Hungarian man in a tweed jacket, his eyes cast downwards deep in thought is not, perhaps, among the most remarkable It is interesting, though, because of its subject. Exquisite artwork - including beautiful beadwork with intricate designs - can be seen in many of the traditional clothing items on display.Pierre, South Dakota has an interesting Cultural Heritage Center (00 1 605 773 3458; www.sdhistory ), largely underground and built to resemble an Arikara house.In Canada, a large section of Ottawa's Canadian Museum of Civilization (00 1 819 776 7000; www.civilization.ca) is devoted to First Nations people.You can learn about the language, history and culture of the Shuswap at the Secwepemc Museum and Heritage Park ( www.secwepemc ) in Kamloops, British Columbia.. Housed in a five-storey, curving, sand-coloured, limestone-and-glass structure, the new museum is part of the Smithsonian Institution and is the US's largest museum dedicated to the preservation, study and exhibition of the life, languages, literature, history and arts of Native Americans.The Plains Indian Museum (00 1 307 587 4771; www.bbhc /pim), just outside Yellowstone National Park in Cody, Wyoming, has artefacts and displays representing the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow, Gros Ventre, Nez Perce, Sioux, Shoshone and other tribes. Enchanted Rock State Natural Area (00 1 325 247 3903; www.tpwd.state.tx.us). MUSEUM PIECESNative American culture is now celebrated in some excellent museums.