Palazzo Falson houses forty-five extraordinary collections which include paintings, silver, furniture, jewellery, Oriental rugs and armoury, as well as a remarkable library containing over 4,500 books, and some highly valuable manuscripts. Capt. Gollcher’s interest in weaponry is evident through the extensive collection on display in the Armoury. The walls are hung with an interesting array of swords, polearms, pistols and guns.
The paintings collection is made up of more than 200 works which include a number of portraits, including family ones, biblical and mythological scenes, and some marine-themed ones, which reflect the fact that the Gollcher family business was in shipping. There are a number of significant 17th century paintings in this collection, including ones attributed to Sir Anthony Van Dyck, David Teniers the Younger, Nicolas Poussin, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Mattia Preti. The impressive silver collection of more than 800 items includes some noteworthy and significant pieces of Maltese, Continental and British silver, most of which are on display in the Strongroom, where Gollcher used to lock up his silver when he went away.
Palazzo Falson has an impressive collection of over eighty Oriental rugs from different areas such as Azerbaijan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, and a selection of these are displayed in the Carpet Gallery.The wealth of the collections held at the palazzo offer the visitor the enriching experience of a museum visit, but within the intimate setting of a private house.
On an almost annual basis Palazzo Falson hosts a temporary exhibition dedicated to some aspect of the decorative or fine arts. These shows take as their starting point an artefact or group of artefacts in the permanent collection of Palazzo Falson and build around it by loaning several artefacts from Maltese private and public collections. The resulting exhibition is an in-depth look at that particular type of artefact and provides probably for the first and only time the possibility of comparing and contrasting so many of these objects gathered under one roof.
Photo credits: palazzofalson.com