Nationalmuseum's collections contain paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints from the Renaissance to 1900, and applied arts and design from the late Middle Ages to the present day. We also manage the national portrait gallery at Gripsholm Castle, and a collection of Gustavsberg porcelain.
Paintings and sculptures
Nationalmuseum's collections of paintings and sculptures comprise some 16,000 works. Artists like Rembrandt, Rubens, Goya, Renoir, Degas and Gauguin are represented, as are Swedish masters Carl Larsson, Ernst Josephson, C F Hill and Anders Zorn. The collections include art from the late Middle Ages up until the beginning of the 20th century, with an emphasis on Swedish 18th- and 19th-century painting. Dutch painting from the 17th century is also well represented, and our French 18th-century collection is considered one of the finest in the world.
Design and applied arts
Our collection of applied arts, design and industrial design spans a long period, from the 14th century to today. It consists of ca. 30,000 objects, of which a third are ceramics. Other types of objects include textiles, glass, precious and non-precious metals, furniture, and books.
Form and artistic value are the basic criteria behind our acquisitions. Pieces from Sweden and the other Nordic countries are given priority, but other countries are represented too, especially those that have played a key role in the development of design.
Prints and drawings
Nationalmuseum owns about 500,000 prints and drawings from the late Middle Ages to the year 1900. Central to the collections are more than 2,000 master drawings that Carl Gustaf Tessin acquired during his time as Sweden's ambassador to France. Key works in the collections are prints and drawings by Rembrandt, Watteau, Edouard Manet, Johan Tobias Sergel, Carl Larsson, Carl Fredrik Hill and Ernst Josephson.
National portrait gallery and the Royal Castles collections
The Royal Castles collections started out as the art collections of the State's royal pleasure-palaces. They gradually extended to comprise 18 palaces, manors and other units. Today, they contain the majority of the paintings, drawings, engravings, and sculptures at five of the royal pleasure-palaces: Gripsholm, Drottningholm, Strömsholm, Rosersberg and Ulriksdal.
The largest of the Royal Castles collections is the national portrait gallery. Founded in 1822 at Gripsholm Castle, it includes 5,000 works of art.
The Gustavsberg collection
The Gustavsberg collection consists of approximately 45,000 objects manufactured at the Gustavsberg porcelain factory from the 1830s until the factory's closing in 1994.