Valkhof Museum

Founded in 1998, the Valkhof Museum in Nijmegen was the result of the merger between the G.M. Kam archaeology museum and the St John’s Commandery of Ancient and Modern Art. The museum stands on the site of what was once a Roman army camp in Noviomagus, the most important Roman city in the Netherlands. The museum’s collection therefore includes archaeological finds from the Roman period as well as Early Modern art, applied arts, and modern art.

Among the highlights of the early modern art collection is a fifteenth-century antependium belonging to the Ship’s Captains Guild of Nijmegen, made for the altar in the chapel of St. Stephen’s church. The cloth is the largest Dutch piece of embroidery from the Middle Ages. The Kanis Triptych, made by The Master of the Kanis Triptych in 1526 – the only artwork that survived the ravages of the Iconoclastic Fury in St. Stephen’s church, is among the highlights of the collection.

Several landscapes are important to the collection since they were made in the surrounding area. They include View of the River Waal and the Valkhof Citadel by Jan van Goyen (1641), Bird’s Eye View of Nijmegen by Hendrik Feltman (1668–1669), and the pen-and-ink drawing View of a Farm and a Country House with a Dome at Hees by Hendrik Hoogers (1733).

The applied arts collection includes objects made by Nijmegen silversmiths, such as the owl-shaped Coconut Cup made by The Master of the Cloverleaf (c. 1580-1590) and a silver-gilt box made by Albert Hermens Gramey (c. 1657–1658). Besides the silver, other noteworthy objects in this section include the Crucified Christ carved from oak by Arnt van Zwolle (1480), the seventeenth-century celestial and terrestrial globes produced by the Blaeu firm, and the seventeenth-century tapestry by Michel Wauters and Giovanni Francesco Romanelli.