Museum Puri Lukisan

Museum Puri Lukisan — "Museum of Painted Palaces" — was established in 1956 through a collaboration between the Ubud royal family, represented by Cokorda Gde Agung Sukawati, and the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet. It was the first museum in Bali dedicated to preserving Balinese fine art and remains the most important historical collection of traditional Balinese painting and sculpture on the island. The museum occupies a series of traditional Balinese pavilions set within a formal garden of lotus ponds, frangipani trees, and ceremonial gates in the centre of Ubud. Four main pavilions house the permanent collection chronologically: the oldest gallery contains examples of classical Kamasan painting — the flat, narrative style derived from Hindu-Buddhist manuscript illumination that dominated Balinese art until the 1920s; subsequent galleries trace the transformation brought about by the Pita Maha artists' cooperative (1936–1942), which Western artists like Bonnet and Walter Spies helped found, encouraging Balinese painters to depict daily life and the natural world in a more observational, naturalistic style. The result was an explosion of artistic creativity that produced what art historians now call the "Ubud style" — dense, narrative compositions showing market scenes, rice harvests, cockfights, ceremonies, and forest landscapes populated with dozens of minutely observed figures. The museum's collection of 300+ works includes examples by the most significant artists of this period: I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, Anak Agung Gede Sobrat, and I Gusti Made Deblog.