Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum

Geschichte

The Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum is an art museum in Aachen, Germany.HistoryThe Aachener Museumsverein was created in 1877, and in 1883 a city museum was opened in the Alte Redoute 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. 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.In 1901, the museum moved to the, originally owned by the Cassalette family which had acquired fortune through the Aachener Kratzenfabrik Cassalette, 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.The most recent expansion was in 1992 to 1994. Major gifts were received from Anton Ignaz van Houtem and Franz Johann Joseph Bock.