Information
The Museum Schnütgen evolved in 1906 from the private collection of the cathedral canon Alexander Schnütgen. It has a focus on art from the Rhineland region, supplemented by works from neighboring regions. The collection spans the period from the middle ages, through the baroque, until nineteenth-century Medievalism. However, panel painting is hardly represented for historical reasons.
The collection has been enriched over the last decades through important acquisitions from regions that are currently in Belgium and the Netherlands. The majority of these hundred works are from the fifteenth and sixteenth century. These include statues from the workshop of the Rimini- Master (ca. 1430), stained glass such as the Cabinet-panes with the story of Tobias (southern Netherlands, around 1500), textiles art like the chasuble of the Utrecht carpenter’s guild (Utrecht, 1509), a Flemish book of hours (around 1510), pipe-clay figures from Utrecht, two-faced heads and statues from ivory from the southern Netherlands up to the baroque period. The Crowed Calvary (southern Netherlands, ca. 1430-1440) and the Passion retable by Jan Borman III (Brussels, around 1520) are exceptional examples of wooden sculptures from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century. The museum recently acquired an extraordinary alabaster relief with two annunciations (Burgundian Netherlands, around 1410-1420) from the period of the soft style.
Karen Straub, Curator (October 2020)
Collection catalogues
Das Schnütgen-Museum: eine Auswahl
Cologne 1968
Museum Schnütgen – A Survey of the Collection
Ed. by Moritz Woelk and Manuela Beer, Munich 2018