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The Kasteev State Museum is the largest art museum in Kazakhstan and a well-known regional center of research and education in the field of art history. Founded in 1976, the museum brings together the former collections of the Shevchenko Kazakh State Gallery (established in 1935) and the Republic Museum of Decorative and Applied Arts. In 1984, the museum was renamed in honor of Abilkhan Kasteev (1904–1973), the first Kazakh artist to be awarded the title of National Artist of Kazakhstan.

The museum’s Dutch and Flemish artworks comprise an important part of its collection and include 54 paintings and ten prints. The first exhibits were donated by the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts (Moscow) in 1936. Additional Dutch and Flemish art were later acquired from private collections. 

Sixteenth-century Northern Renaissance painting is represented by Dutch paintings such as The Adoration of the Magi and Herod’s Feast by unknown artists and Joachim Beuckelaer’s In the Shop, as well as Flemish paintings such as Winter Landscape, by an unknown Flemish artist and the Festive Procession by Marten Pepijn.

The museum’s seventeenth-century Dutch paintings include Dirck Hals’s Card Players and Landscape with Figures from the circle of Aelbert Cuyp as well as Orpheus among the Beasts by the Flemish-born artist Roelant Savery. There is also a superb example of Dutch still life painting: Abraham van Beijeren’s Still Life with Fish, in which the freshness of the fish is almost tangible. 

Contrasting with the serenity of Dutch paintings are the dramatic biblical compositions of seventeenth-century Flemish artists, such as St. Sebastian by an unknown artist and The Battle between the Israelites and the Amalekites by Frans Francken the Younger. A very different example of Flemish art is the Portrait of the Princess Henrietta-Marie de France by the portraitist Frans Pourbus the Younger.