About Nationalmuseum

Nationalmuseum is Sweden’s museum of art and design. The collections consist of paintings, sculpture and paper-based artworks from the 16th to the 20th century, and applied art and design from the 16th century to the present day. The total number of artifacts is around 700,000. The museum is located on Blasieholmen in Stockholm, in a purpose-built edifice designed by Friedrich August Stüler, a German architect, and completed in 1866. The museum’s history pre-dates the building. The collections were moved to Blasieholmen having previously, in part, been kept in the “Royal Museum” founded 1792 and since 1794 located in the north garden wing of the Royal Palace in Stockholm. 2013-2018 the museum building went through a major renovation.

Nationalmuseum is a government authority with a staff of about 150. Susanna Pettersson is Director General since August 1st, 2018. Every year, Nationalmuseum produces a number of major temporary exhibitions such as Henri de Toulouse- Lautrec, The Pre-Raphaelites, Caspar David Friedrich, Rubens and van Dyck and The Peredvizhniki. The museum provides a large number of works on loan each year to exhibitions at other museums in Sweden and abroad.

Extensive research is conducted at Nationalmuseum, using the museum’s own collections as a starting point. A dedicated research department, opened in 1997, incorporates the museum’s archives and publications department and the Art Library, one of the largest art libraries in the Nordic countries, a resource shared with Moderna Museet. The museum also has a conservation department, with special expertise in the various types of artifact in each collection. The department works on preserving the artworks and collaborates with the research department on technical studies.

The museum’s activities extend beyond the building on Blasieholmen. For example, the Swedish National Portrait Gallery at Gripsholm Castle is also part of Nationalmuseum. Nationalmuseum also has full or partial responsibility for managing art collections at various museums and tourist attractions across Sweden. These include Drottningholm Palace, Läckö Castle, Leufsta Manor, Vadstena Castle and the Gustavsberg Porcelain Museum among others. The Orangery Museum at Ulriksdal and the Museum de Vries house major parts of the museum’s sculpture collection.

The Collections

Early history A large number of works in the museum’s collections derive from royal collecting over many generations. Of the works previously in royal ownership, many were acquired on the basis of personal preference, but there are also several examples of items that entered the royal collections in the 17th century as spoils of war.

In May 1632, Swedish troops captured Munich, where Gustavus Adolphus exacted a heavy toll on the collections of Elector Maximilian I. Nationalmuseum’s current collection contains Ludwig Refinger’s Horatius Cocles Stopping Porsenna’s Army before Rome and Combat between Manlius Torquatus and a Gaul, and Melchior Feselen’s Alesia besieged by Julius Caesar.

In July 1648, during the final stages of the Thirty Years War, the Swedes took parts of Rudolf II’s formerly extensive art collections in Prague. The booty included paintings by Albrecht Dürer, Paolo Veronese and Giuseppe Arcimboldo, bronze figures by Adriaen de Vries and a number of other valuable objets d’art. Of the paintings, 60 now remain in Nationalmuseum’s collection and the Swedish National Portrait Gallery. A majority of the sculptures by Adriaen de Vries have remained in Sweden, where most of them were placed in Drottningholm Park in the late 17th century. The originals are now in the Museum de Vries and Nationalmuseum.

Basis of the current collection Many of the works that now form the core of Nationalmuseum’s pre-19th century painting collection originate mainly from a handful of collectors: Carl Gustaf Tessin, Queen Lovisa Ulrika, King Adolf Fredrik and King Gustav III. These collections were dominated by Dutch, French and Gustavian Swedish painting, which thus greatly influenced the composition of Nationalmuseum’s present-day collection.

Several of the works in Nationalmuseum’s 18th-century French painting collection once belonged to Queen Lovisa Ulrika. In 1777 the queen’s financial situation became untenable, partly as a result of expensive collecting on a large scale. Her son, Sweden’s then King Gustav III, settled her debts in return for her surrendering her collections along with Drottningholm Palace. The fact that the king used government funds rather than his own was of lasting significance to today’s Nationalmuseum, since this prevented the collections from being dispersed through inheritance.

Carl Gustaf Tessin undoubtedly has had the greatest influence on the museum’s collections, not least because many of the works in Adolf Fredrik’s and Lovisa Ulrika’s collections were there thanks to his efforts. Among others he had acquired paintings by Nicolas Lancret, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin and François Boucher’s Triumph of Venus, which was exhibited at the 1740 Salon. He also acquired Rembrandt’s Portrait of Young Woman in Profile and Constantin Verhout’s Sleeping Student.

Swedish art collection In the 19th Century the collection was not so well endowed when it came to contemporary painting, owing to the museum’s classical focus and years of weak finances. In 1845 the museum purchased its first work by a living artist, Italian Bandits Abducting Women by Alexander Lauréus. In 1856 the museum was allocated a budget for purchasing modern Swedish art. Acquisition of works by Josef Magnus Stäck, Marcus Larsson, Amalia Lindegren, Carl Wahlbom, Johan Fredrik Höckert, Mårten Eskil Winge, Josef Wilhelm Wallander and Alfred Wahlberg followed. A donation by Karl XV was also to be of great importance to the Swedish collection. In 1872 he donated the bulk of his collection of contemporary Swedish and Nordic painting, about 400 works, to Nationalmuseum.

The years that followed would be dominated by two points of view regarding acquisitions: one faction advocated historical painting, while the other was concerned that the museum’s acquisitions should reflect developments in art. The situation mirrored a similar argument playing out at the same time within the Academy of Fine Arts, between the older generation and the younger.

Expansion of Swedish and French 19th-century art At the beginning of the 20th century the director general Richard Bergh, himself an artist, was troubled by the gaps in the collection resulting from the poorly coordinated acquisition strategy of the previous decades. What was missing was mainly works by the Opponents, although some major works by these artists had been acquired for the collection in the past. Many of the most significant works from the 1880s and 90s had already been acquired by other museums in Sweden and Scandinavia, so this was considered a matter of urgency. 1915 Bergh launched an appeal among wealthy art lovers, which resulted in the donation of six paintings by Carl Fredrik Hill, twelve works by Ernst Josephson, ten by Nils Kreuger and five by Karl Nordström. The works donated are now a staple feature of exhibitions from the museum’s collections.

Another area that Bergh wanted to improve was 19th-century French art. Shortly before his appointment, the museum had purchased some works by Edgar Degas and Alfred Sisley, with financial assistance from the Friends of Nationalmuseum and others. Anders Zorn had donated Edouard Manet’s Pear Peeler, but the collection remained very modest in numerical terms. In 1916 a pastel by Degas and a landscape by Paul Cézanne were bought and in the autumn of that year Bergh acquired some further works with the help of donors, including Auguste Renoir’s Conversation and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s Tightrope Walker. The year after Manet’s Parisienne, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Red Cliffs of Civita Castellana and Théodore Géricault’s Severed Heads were acquired through a cooperation with a number of private collectors.

Thanks to Bergh’s efforts, and subsequent purchases and donations, Nationalmuseum’s collection of 19th- century French art expanded considerably. When the collector Klas Fåhræus was forced to sell his collection for financial reasons in 1926, the museum managed, with the aid of the Friends of Nationalmuseum, to acquire works including Auguste Renoir’s At Mother Anthony’s Inn, Gustave Courbet’s Jo, the Beautiful Irishwoman, and Cézanne’s Still Life with Figurine. In several instalments, Grace and Philip Sandblom donated significant works by Eugène Delacroix, Courbet and Cézanne. Other highlights include Renoir’s La Grenouillère, which was donated to the museum in 1924 by an anonymous donor through the Friends of Nationalmuseum.

During Richard Bergh’s tenure, modernism also entered the museum. Over the next few decades, Nationalmuseum actively acquired 20th-century art, for which the exhibition space was rather limited. In 1958, Moderna Museet (the Museum of Modern Art) opened in a former naval drill hall on Skeppsholmen, and 20th-century art had its own premises.

Engraving and drawing collection Nationalmuseum’s collection of drawings and graphic art comprises some 500,000 pages in total, dating from the Late Middle Ages to around 1900. The core of the collection consists of more than 2,000 master drawings purchased by Carl Gustaf Tessin in Paris in 1742 at the auction of the French collector Pierre Crozat’s estate. These include works by artists such as Raphael, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Rembrandt and French rococo masters. For financial reasons Tessin was forced to sell the collection to King Adolf Fredrik. It was later acquired by Gustav III, thanks to whom it ended up in the Royal Museum, via the National Library, and subsequently passed to Nationalmuseum.

Another person who played a significant role in developing the collection was Johan Tobias Sergel. During his sojourn in Rome, he collected drawings by Johann Heinrich Füssli, Angelica Kauffman and others, as well as drawings by old masters, several of which are now in Nationalmuseum’s collection. However, Sergel’s own drawings were the part of his legacy that most enriched the collection. In 1875 the museum purchased more than 800 drawings from his estate.

The collection of engravings, especially Nicodemus Tessin the Younger’s collection of architecture-related pages, is another important part of the engraving and drawing collection. The collection also contains pages that belonged to the architects Carl Johan Cronstedt and Carl Hårleman.

Applied art and design collection At the end of the 19th Century influential voices spoke out in favour of a dedicated museum of applied art. In 1877 a committee proposed that this be built south of Hötorget in Stockholm, but the plans never came to fruition. Around the same time, the museum received two large donations from King Karl XV (2,500 pieces) and Axel Bielke (2,200 pieces). Then, in 1884, the the Swedish Society of Crafts and Design donated 2,700 pieces. The donations were not enough to bring about a separate museum, but it was enough to ensure that the collection would become a separate department in 1885.

The collection is divided into two periods, the first extending from roughly 1500 to 1750, and the second from the 1910s to the present day. The older part of the collection consists primarily of valuable items once owned by royalty and other wealthy individuals. Examples include the “Bielke bed” and the Alhambra vase.

In the modern section, the scope of the museum’s collection has been expanded to include basic utility items of various kinds – a logical consequence of the emergence of the applied arts industry and the entire concept of design. The collection contains examples ranging from items designed under the motto of “beautifying everyday life” to the kind of modernism whereby artifacts employ streamlined design but are made of expensive materials.

Swedish National Portrait Gallery The Swedish National Portrait Gallery is managed by Nationalmuseum and displayed at Gripsholm Castle. It was founded in 1822 and the collection consists of portraits from the late 15th century to the present day and contains some 5,000 works in various media, making it the world’s largest portrait collection. The portraits are displayed both in the castle’s various interiors and in several dedicated picture galleries. The collection is continuously augmented with older and contemporary portraits of people who, for various reasons, have a place in history. Each year at least one honorary portrait is added: a portrait of a subject chosen by representatives of the Gripsholm Association and Nationalmuseum in recognition of the importance of his or her work. Those honoured in this way include Dag Hammarskjöld, Gunnar Nordahl, Olof Palme, Benny Andersson and Ingvar Kamprad.

Miniatures collection Nationalmuseum’s collection of miniatures numbers about 5,200 pieces. The works in the collection are of varied provenance, including various members of the royal family, but of particular importance are two donations and a large number of acquisitions made in the recent past. The donations were made in 1894 by Carl Fredrik Dahlgren and in 1927 by Hjalmar Wicander. Also of great importance is the fund that Wicander instituted many years after his donation, which has made it possible in recent years to augment the collection with what are now some of its most prominent pieces, by artists such as Francisco de Goya and Louis Marie Autissier. The collection includes many works by Peter Adolf Hall, the Swedish miniature painter who enjoyed great success in France.