Nave Museum – Victoria, TX
The Nave Museum is a small fine arts museum a few blocks from downtown Victoria, and even from the outside it’s worth the stop. The building is a little Greek Revival temple with six marble columns, and it has a sweet story behind it: when Texas painter Royston Nave died suddenly in 1931, his widow, Emma McFaddin McCan Nave, commissioned it as a memorial to him. It opened in 1932 and is now on the National Register of Historic Places.
Nave was a well-regarded portrait painter with a career that stretched from Victoria to New York, and the museum still keeps dozens of his paintings, with some always on display alongside five or so rotating exhibits each year featuring Texas artists. Admission is donation-based, and from their website, some art is for sale.
The lawn gets its own little exhibition too: a handful of rusted steel sculptures stand in the grass between the columns and the street, keeping watch over the neighborhood. Nobody was around to tell us who made them, so we admired them anonymously.
Since it was closed on Christmas Day, we were not able to see inside. We’ll have to save the galleries for a return trip, but the building alone made for lovely pictures, and it’s just a couple of blocks from DeLeon Plaza, so it might be worth a stop if you’re already walking downtown.
