Collection

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s entire collection, which is the result of 172 years of collecting, will be preserved and cared for in the depot. All the works will be housed together, creating juxtapositions and cross connections that have never existed before.

The museum derives its name from two important collectors: Frans Boijmans and Daniël George van Beuningen. They added many masterpieces to the collection, including the ‘Achilles series’ by Peter Paul Rubens and ‘A Cornfield, in the Background the Zuiderzee’ by Jacob van Ruisdael. The museum contains old master paintings and sculpture, modern and contemporary art, decorative arts, pre-industrial household objects and industrial design. The collections of prints and drawings, early Netherlandish painting, Impressionism and Surrealism are among the best in the world. The museum has been collecting paintings and other objects by Dalí, Magritte, Ernst and others since the nineteen-sixties. But Surrealism is by no means a closed movement. Fantastic imaginary worlds full of bewildering figures start with Jheronimus Bosch, and the surreal perspective continues as a leitmotif through the collection. To this day artists and designers offer us their disconcerting, shocking or curious take on everyday reality.