page_title: Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Gemäldegalerie, Berlin / History
context_page_description: The Gemäldegalerie is an art museum in Berlin, Germany, and the museum where the main selection of paintings belonging to the Berlin State Museums is displayed. It holds one of the world's leading collections of European paintings from the 13th to the 18th centuries. Its collection includes masterpieces from such artists as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Holbein, Rogier van der Weyden, Jan van Eyck, Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Caravaggio, Giambattista Pittoni, Peter Paul Rubens, David Teniers the Younger, Rembrandt, Johannes Vermeer, and Antonio Viviani. It was first opened in 1830, and the current building was completed in 1998. It is located in the Kulturforum museum district west of Potsdamer Platz.
context_section_description: Unlike most major national European collections (with the exception of the National Gallery, London), the Gemäldegalerie collection is not essentially formed around the former dynastic royal collection, but created by a process of acquisition by the Prussian government beginning in 1815. From the first the museum was intended to reflect the full range of European art, giving a different emphasis from that of older royal collections, including the royal collection of Saxony, now mostly in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden, the finest German princely collection, which like other royal collections is strongest in Italian art.
  The collection was first opened to the public in 1830, on completion of construction of the Royal Museum, now called the Altes Museum ("Old Museum"), designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and sited by the Lustgarten opposite the Royal Palace on the other side of Unter den Linden. The paintings occupied the upper floor with the collection of antiquities on the lower.  At this point the collection contained nearly 1200 paintings, with a core of 160 from the 17th century collection of Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, bought in Paris in 1815. An even more important purchase was 677 paintings from the collection formed in Berlin by the English merchant Edward Solly, which were acquired in 1821; Solly was an early collector of Italian Trecento and Quattrocento paintings and Early Netherlandish painting. Purchases continued throughout the 19th century, with 345 works acquired during the inaugural directorship of Gustav Friedrich Waagen from 1830–1868, though paintings competed with antiquities for rather reduced purchasing budgets. 
  After Berlin became the capital of the new German Empire in 1871 the funds available greatly increased, and purchases accelerated, as Berlin strove to catch up with the greatest European collections.  In 1874 the collection acquired the best of the collection of mostly north European art formed by the industrialist Barthold Suermondt of Aachen after his business collapsed.  This was handled for the museum by the art historian Wilhelm von Bode, who had joined in 1872, and was to be the Berlin Museums' greatest Director. He headed the sculpture collections from 1883, then the paintings from 1890, becoming general head of the Berlin Museums from 1890 to 1920. A specialist in Rembrandt and Dutch painting, he made very significant additions in those areas, but did not neglect Italian painting. His leadership marked the rise of the Gemäldegalerie to international prominence.
  In 1904 the Gemäldegalerie moved to the newly built Kaiser Friedrich Museum, now the Bode Museum, where the collection continued to expand. The museum was badly damaged during World War II, but most of the collection survived the war in shelters across Germany. At the end of the war, however, 400 works that were regarded as too large to take to the remoter hiding places were destroyed in a fire in a Flak tower that served as a bomb shelter.  Many important altarpieces and other large works were lost, and the collection remains short of very large works compared to the other major European collections.  Furthermore, several hundred paintings were looted by Russian or American soldiers or confiscated by the Red Army and never returned, although in June 2006 a small painting by Alessandro Allori, missing since 1944, was returned by the British journalist Charles Wheeler, who had picked it up at the end of the war in Berlin. The surviving collection was divided between East Berlin (mostly at the Bode Museum on Museumsinsel) and West Berlin in Berlin-Dahlem, where from the 1950s they were housed in a building originally used for the Asiatic collections, built in 1923, with post-war additions.
  Purchases for the West Berlin collection eventually resumed after the war, with Dutch Golden Age painting, Italian Baroque painting, and the creation of a small section for English painting being priorities for successive directors before the Re-unification of Germany.  In 1992 the museum administrations of East and West were r
caption: Company at a Meal by David Teniers the Younger.
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