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Museum Schloss Rheydt in Mönchengladbach is housed in the only fully preserved Renaissance castle complex on the Lower Rhine, close to the Dutch border. The medieval castle site acquired its present Renaissance form between 1558 and 1570, when Otto von Bylandt commissioned Maximilian Pasqualini to remodel the complex. The museum’s institutional history begins with a civic local-history collection founded in 1897; in 1922 the municipal museum moved into Schloss Rheydt. Since the 1950s, a focused collection of Renaissance and early Baroque art and culture has been developed to complement the historic setting. Dutch and Flemish art from ca. 1400–1750 forms an important part of the permanent display. The holdings include paintings, prints and drawings, maps, sculpture, ivory, faience, metalwork, furniture, mortars, and cabinets. Highlights include two works by Joos van Cleve and dynastic portraits of the House of Orange-Nassau. These connect the collection to the German-Dutch borderland and to the von Bylandt family, whose roots lie in the Netherlands.
Nils Kappen, Head of Collections (July 2026)