Museums and Palaces

The museum has a valuable collection of more 600 pieces, including sculptures, azulejos, drawings, engravings and medals by the expressionist artist Martins Correia (born 1910).

Martins Correia,  "sculptor of colour", was born in Golegã in 1910. Because of the death of his parents, he entered the Casa Pia in Lisbon while still at a very young age. This centuries-old charitable institution is an important school aiding human development and providing technical and professional training that makes the most of each individual student´s aptitudes and personality.

Martins Correia was thus able to continue his studies at the school of Fine Arts, where he took a course in drawing. His taste for shapes and outlines, and for drawing, meant that he was soon attracted to sculpture. This vocation was also noted in him by a teacher at the school of Fine Arts.

He then worked as a teacher and artist, beginning to develop his great passion: working with bronze. Yet his creative work is not limited to bronze pieces, nor even just to sculpture. His silk-screen designs, paintings, stone pieces and his work with fired and glazed clay (such as the ceramic panel measuring seven metres by three, exhibited on the façade of his home in Golegã), all reveal the versatility of his creative spirit.

Colour in the form of strong Mediterranean shades is one of the distinctive features of his work, as can be seen in the decoration that he produced for the Picoas Underground Stationin Lisbon, in 1994. Recurrent themes in his work are horses, bulls, the land and women. All these are closely connected to the region where he was born - the Ribatejo - and highlight the importance of his Ribatejano and Portuguese roots.

Martins Correia has already been awarded the Order of Santiago and has been made an Officer of the Order of Public Instruction. He has also won many other prizes, including those awarded by the National Fine Arts Society, the Fine Arts Academy and the Diário de Notícias newspaper.

He is a member of the Lisbon Municipal Council´s Art and Archaeology Council and an honorary member of the Lisbon National Fine Arts Academy, yet, even so, the great master has in fact donated most of his work to the town of Golegã, where it is exhibited at the Martins Correia Municipal Museum.