Museum Mayer van den Bergh

Museum Mayer van den Bergh is a museum in Antwerp, Belgium, housing the collection of the art dealer and collector Fritz Mayer van den Bergh (1858-1901). The major works are from the Gothic and Renaissance period in the Netherlands and Belgium, including paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

Mad Meg by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, is one of the masterpieces in the museum.
Portrait of Fritz Mayer van den Bergh by Jozef Janssens, 1901
Page from the Breviarium Mayer van den Bergh, depicting The torture of multiple saints

History

Fritz Mayer van den Bergh, born in 1858, collected art for most of his life, making his most expensive and important additions between 1897 and his death in 1901. He was especially interested in art from the 14th to sixteenth century, while his contemporaries considered the Gothic and Renaissance art dated. This fact enabled him to create a collection of 1.000 pieces of mostly Northern Renaissance art. After his death, his mother Henriette Mayer van den Bergh built a neo-gothic house in the banking district of Antwerp between 1901 and 1904, as a museum for the expansive art collection.[1]

Collection

Notes

  1. "Art: HIDDEN MASTERPIECES: Brueghel's Proverbs". Time. 12 October 1959. Retrieved 24 September 2009.



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