Information
Founded in 1870 as museum for ‘Rhenish and Westphalian Antiquities’, the LVR-LandesMuseum Bonn was initially an archeological museum. Some works of art were collected as well, but only when in 1909 the huge collection of Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck found its home in a newly built wing of the museum, the foundation of its art collection was laid. Ever since, archeology and art were presented side by side in the permanent exhibition.
Apart from Italian, French and Spanish Masters, the Wesendonck collection also brought Dutch and Flemish Art from the late Middle Ages to the eighteenth century to the museum, from an exquisite triptych by Jan Mostaert to genre scenes, still lifes and landscapes by Breughel, van Goyen, Teniers and their compatriots. The various relationships between the two neighboring regions of Rhineland and the Netherlands over the centuries, be it trade or cultural transfer, made Dutch art a permanent focus of the collection of the LVR-LandesMuseum until today. Nowadays the collection comprises about 170 paintings by Dutch and Flemish masters, not mainly focused on a handful of ‘big names’, but rather including a broad set of artists from various regions, schools and contexts. The collection allows a deep look into the variety of themes and subjects, into the social history of artists, into tastes and preferences of cities and decades and in the socio-cultural background of the production and the art market in the Netherlands of the so called ‘Golden Age’.
Bianca Wiesen, Assistant Curator (October 2020)
Collection catalogues
Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn: Gemälde bis 1900
Goldkuhle, Fritz, Ingeborg Krueger and Hans M. Schmidt
Cologne 1982