A few days after Rusiñol’s death on June 13th, 1931, in Aranjuez, the town of Sitges discovered that it was the heir to the Cau Ferrat building and his collections. Thus, the painter’s esteem toward the town was sealed once and for all.
The Sitges Town Hall’s inability to pay the taxes ensuing from the acceptance of the inheritance required an important strategy that Joaquim Folch i Torres, director of the Museum of Art of Barcelona at the time, carried out to achieve this. The intervention of the Generalitat de Catalunya and of various sectors of the Nation’s Government favored an understanding according to which, the Town’s Hall’s debt was pardoned in exchange for the creation of a board of trustees in charge of managing the public museum, which had to include the presence of the Nation, represented in Catalonia by the Generalitat, recently reinstated.
The tasks of registering and documenting all of the Museum’s collections throughout 1932, performed by technicians headed by Folch i Torres, were exemplary and are a unique case in the history of Catalan museums. The Cau Ferrat was opened as a public museum on April 16th, 1933.
