The Alte Nationalgalerie announces its purpose before the first painting. Raised above its surroundings on Berlin’s Museum Island, its temple-like form gives art a public monument of its own. The classical outline is a nineteenth-century statement, not an ancient building borrowed for a museum. Inside, the collection moves through the art of that century and into the early twentieth, bringing Romantic landscapes, realism, sculpture and French Impressionism into a setting made for the encounter.
The story began with a private collection. Banker Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener, who died in 1861, left his paintings to the Prussian state with the wish that they be publicly displayed and developed into a national gallery. Friedrich August Stüler translated the architectural idea into a building; after his death, Johann Heinrich Strack completed it. The museum opened on 22 March 1876, turning a collector’s bequest into an institution with a prominent place in Berlin.
