Museum Bredius Museum

Welcome to Museum Bredius. Home to Abraham Bredius’s private art collection. Here we offer you an opportunity to view around 200 paintings, twenty drawings and some 500 exhibits brought together by the great collector. 

Originally, this collection was shown in Bredius’s home on Prinsengracht in The Hague. The connoisseur had gone to live in Monaco, and had sold his house to the city. On the understanding that he could stay at the house on Prinsegracht whenever he visited Holland.

When he died in 1946, the art collection passed to The Hague, as Bredius had promised. However, the Prinsengracht neighbourhood was deteriorating, and the number of visitors declined dramatically. Some forty years after the collector’s death, the municipality decided to close the museum.

The sense of outrage felt among art lovers in The Hague led to the formation of a group determined to remedy the situation. They managed to find this grand residence on Lange Vijverberg, an A1 listed building, in the middle of the museum quarter. The house dates from 1760. It was designed by Pieter de Swart. He was architect to the court of Stadholder William IV, the Prince of Rococo. For many years it remained in private hands, the last of its residents being Frits Lugt, whose famous art collection is now in Paris, at Fondation Custodia. After the war, it briefly housed the French Embassy, and then became home to the city’s costume museum. That short-lived experiment lasted until the 1980s, when the building again changed hands. Bought and restored with private funding, in 1990, Museum Bredius opened to the public.