Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen, House museum in Parioli district, Rome, Italy.
Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen is a house museum in the Prati neighborhood of Rome, set inside Villa Helene, a building with two large ground floor studios and living quarters on the upper floors. The collection covers sculpture, painting, and prints made across the full span of his career.
Andersen, a Norwegian-American sculptor, had Villa Helene built between 1922 and 1925 on land he had purchased in Rome. He left the entire property and everything in it to the Italian state when he died in 1940.
Andersen spent decades working toward a vision of a world city governed by peace and cooperation, and the oversized figures he made for it fill the ground floor studio. Walking among them, visitors get a direct sense of how personal and all-consuming that project was for him.
The museum is a short walk from the Tiber River, in a residential part of Prati that is easy to reach on foot from several central points. The collection is spread across multiple floors connected only by stairs, so visitors with limited mobility should keep this in mind before visiting.
Henry James, the novelist, was a close friend of Andersen and wrote him a series of letters urging him to step away from his studio and travel more. Some of those letters are kept in the museum's archive and offer a glimpse into a friendship that shaped Andersen's years in Rome.
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