Art & History · Old San Juan
The House
That Jan Built
An artist's house, still alive with her vision.
Six 18th-century buildings on the old city wall - a ruin made into a gallery, a studio, a home, and one of Old San Juan's most magical rooms, by the painter and sculptor Jan D'Esopo.
Six buildings, five centuries
Stones that remember
The Gallery Inn's story is woven into Puerto Rico's. Its oldest building once housed the artillery captain who manned the defenses of El Morro against the British in the late 1700s, high on the North Wall above the sea. As the island passed from Spanish rule toward a U.S. commonwealth, these six buildings stood firm - old walls that still hold the weather, the salt, and the centuries.
1961
A painter finds a ruin
In 1961, the painter and sculptor Jan D'Esopo came to Puerto Rico from New England - drawn, she'd say, by the Caribbean's brilliant color and exquisite light. Exploring the old city as its restoration began, she came upon a ruin: the former quarters of that artillery captain. She knew at once. Here she would make her paintings and her sculpture; here she would marry Manuco and raise her children, and watch grandchildren run the courtyards.
Over thirty years she restored and grew the house, building by building, until - by the early 1980s - it became The Gallery Inn.
The work
Watercolor, bronze, and a gallery for the young
Jan trained in painting and sculpture at Bennington and the Yale School of Fine Arts, and won her first awards as a child. In Puerto Rico she found her subject. Her watercolors - a style all her own - carried the island's light into collections around the world, and in 1985 the Bronx Museum of the Arts gathered more than ninety of them for a retrospective.
With Manuco she built the only foundry for figurative bronze on the island; her monuments stand at the Capitol and in Plaza San Justo. She taught watercolor for years at the Art Students League and founded two galleries - one devoted to lifting up young artists, the work the house still carries on.
The house cockatoo
Meet Campeche
Campeche is a beloved resident of The Gallery Inn, a Moluccan cockatoo who has often been called "Puerto Rico's most famous bird." His presence has become part of the music, memory, and charm of the house.
He greets performers and guests alike, and turns up, feathers and all, wherever the music is being made.
The house today
Every corner has a story
Walk the Inn and you walk through her work. Paintings and sculpture stand where they were made; chandeliers hang over old wood and terracotta; a cockatoo calls from a courtyard; a piano waits in a candlelit room. Nothing here is staged - it is a house lived in, and loved, for six decades. A living artwork you can stay inside.
Cultural gravity
Drawn into the house
Something about the place pulls people in. Over the years the Inn has welcomed renowned artists, musicians, and heads of state - Barack and Michelle Obama in 2008, Yo-Yo Ma at the piano, Bad Bunny at a candlelit table - drawn, like everyone, by the art, the music, and the old-world spell of the rooms. They come as guests, not headliners.
Art into music
The music carries it on
What Jan began with paint and bronze, the house continues in sound. The Inn serves as one of the main homes of the Puerto Rico Charitable Trust for the Education of Young Musicians: concerts fill the halls, and the young players she always meant to lift up stay close to the center of its cultural life. Art and music, hospitality and history - at The Gallery Inn they are the same gesture.
Come in
Don't read about the house - stay in it
Every room has a special flavor; every corner, a story. What was once a ruin became a home full of love - and the best way to know it is to come stay.