The Aachener Museumsverein (Aachen museum association) was created in 1877, and in 1883 a city museum was opened in the Alte Redoute (Old Redoubt) building. It was named the Suermondt Museum, after the founder Barthold Suermondt, who gave 105 paintings from his collection to the city, as well as those from the collection of his sister-in-law Adèle Cockerill.[1] This collection, together with many other works which were later sold to Berlin, had been on display in the Suermondt Gallery in Aachen already before the museum was established.[2]
In 1901, the museum moved to the Villa Cassalette [de], originally owned by the Cassalette family which had acquired fortune through the Aachener Kratzenfabrik Cassalette [de], which produced raising cards. Over the next decades, the building was slowly extended to house the ever growing museum collection, interrupted by WWII when the collection was stored for safe-keeping in the Albrechtsburg in Meissen. About 200 paintings were missing after the war, but the museum recently recovered two flower paintings; Flowers in a Glass Vase and Flowers in a Wan-Li Vase.
In 1977, the name of the museum was changed to Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum to honour Irene [de; ru] and Peter Ludwig [es; nl; pl; pt; ru], art collectors who donated a significant part of their collection of art (medieval to modern) to the museum that year, after having given permanent loans from 1957 on.[1]
Building
Interior view of the Villa Cassalette: the central staircase
The family Cassalette, rich factory owners in Aachen, asked the architect Eduard Linse [de] to design a city palace in a Renaissance Revival architecture style, inspired by Venetian palaces. The interior of the Villa Cassalette was richly decorated with murals in the Pompeian style, stucco cassettes on the ceilings, and sculptures. Many small changes and extensions were made when the building became a museum in 1901 and afterwards; but much of the original interior has been restored or made visible again since. In 1992-1994, the architecture company Busmann & Haberer [de] designed a large extension, built at the left side of the Villa.[3]
Other disciplines on display include a large collection of glass painting, 10,000 works of graphic art by artists like Albrecht Dürer, Rembrandt and many others, Flemish tapestries, and works of goldsmiths.[4]
.jpg)
