Segrelles was born in Albaida in 1885 and trained in the studios of Valencia and at Barcelona's Escola de la Llotja, where he learned his craft under masters of the age. A Barcelona exhibition in 1918 announced his arrival, and commissions followed, among them illustrations for the novels of the great Valencian writer Blasco Ibanez. By 1928 his reputation had crossed the Atlantic. He settled on New York's Upper West Side and worked for the glossy magazines of the era, painting fantastical worlds for readers who had never heard of the quiet town where he was born. Few illustrators of his generation travelled so far from their roots.

What set his work apart was light. Segrelles built his scenes around a saturated, otherworldly blue, and Americans admired it so much that they named the colour after him. His imagination ran to the epic and the strange: gods and genies, ruined temples, storms of angels, cities that never existed. He was not painting the world as it looked but as it might feel in a dream or a myth. That instinct made him one of the most sought-after illustrators of the fantastic, a painter equally at home rendering a passage of scripture and a scene from science fiction.

In 1932 he came back to Albaida for good. Then, working from designs he had drawn up during his years in the United States, he began in 1949 to build the house that would become his museum. Here he lived and painted until his death on 3 March 1969, a fortnight short of his eighty-fourth birthday. The building is not a neutral gallery but the artist's own creation, shaped to his eye and his habits, so that walking through it is less like visiting a collection than stepping inside the mind that made it.

The collection sweeps across a lifetime. Early family portraits hang near his last, posthumous canvas, an oil called The Pentecost. Between them lies the astonishing range of his illustration: scenes for Dante's Comedy, for the Thousand and One Nights, for Cervantes, for Poe and H. G. Wells, and even visual responses to passages in Beethoven's fifth and ninth symphonies. He turned his brush to the inside of the human body and to what he called the sidereal, the realm of stars and astronomy, alongside deeply felt religious themes. Few painters attempted so many worlds; fewer still gathered them all under one roof.

Albaida sits in the fertile valley country between Valencia and Alicante, a landscape of vineyards, olive groves and pale limestone hills. It is not a place that shouts for attention, and that seems to be exactly why Segrelles chose it. The man who had illustrated infernos and galaxies wanted, in the end, the ordinary light of his birthplace. The museum keeps that choice visible. It is a stop on the Route of the Valencian Classics, but its deeper subject is simpler and more human: an artist who saw everything, and came home.