Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

This is Nationalmuseum, Sweden’s leading museum for art and design, housed on Blasieholmen in a building created especially for the museum. Friedrich August Stüler designed the building, which was completed in 1866. The institution is Sweden’s largest art museum, with paintings, sculpture, works on paper, craft and design spanning many centuries.

Its holdings number about 700,000 objects. The story behind this building reaches back to the founding of Konglig Museum on the 28th of June 1792, making Nationalmuseum one of Europe’s oldest art museums. The earlier museum opened in 1794 in a wing of the Royal Palace, before the collections moved here.

Much of what you encounter grew from royal collecting that later passed into state ownership. That history includes works once belonging to Gustav Vasa. The museum’s beginnings also carry a dramatic episode: Gustav III acquired ancient sculptures in Italy, including Apollo with the nine Muses and Endymion.

They were intended for a grand royal project at Haga, but after the king’s death the project stopped at its foundations. The sculptures instead became part of the museum’s early display, linking this building to a collection shaped by royal ambition and transformed into public cultural property.