CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

Nationalmuseum

Information

Sweden’s National Museum of Fine Arts (Nationalmuseum), founded in 1792 as the Royal Museum, has a large collection of Netherlandish, Dutch, and Flemish paintings, works on paper, sculptures, and decorative arts from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. The product of three centuries of royal collecting, it includes spoils of war taken to Sweden during the Thirty Years’ War, such as a superb group of sculptures by De Vries and important Mannerist paintings from Munich and Prague. It has several outstanding Baroque works by masters such as Rembrandt – including The Conspiracy of the Batavians, on long-term loan from the Academy of Fine Arts – Rubens, Van Dyck, and Jordaens. Some of these were acquired by Dutch and Flemish migrants who settled in Sweden in the seventeenth century. The internationally-renowned print collection has an important group of works purchased by Count Carl-Gustaf Tessin at the public sale of the Pierre Crozat estate in Paris 1741. Here, too, Rembrandt is well represented. The collection continues to grow steadily thanks to an active acquisitions policy. In 1866 the museum moved to its current location on Blasieholmen, which recently underwent major renovation and redesign of its exhibition galleries and reopened in 2018.

Dr. Carina Fryklund, Senior Curator (September 2023)

Related CODART publications

Linda Hinners, “Adriaen de Vries in Swedish Public Collections”, CODARTfeatures, July 2020.

Dr. Carina Fryklund, “On the Collections of Netherlandish, Dutch and Flemish Art in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm”, CODARTfeatures, October 2013.

Previous events since 1999


News about this institution