Old National Gallery

Old National Gallery, art museum in Berlin, Germany, noted for its collection of 19th-century European painting and sculpture.

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The Old National Gallery is one of the museums that make up the world famous National Museums of Berlin, and, together with the Old (Altes), Bode, New (Neues), and Pergamon museums located on the city’s Museum Island, it was listed in 1999 as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The word Old in its name refers both to the relative age of the building (it was completed in 1876, whereas the New National Gallery was completed in 1968) and to the relative age of its collection. The works by 19th-century German artists are particularly noteworthy.

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The gallery boasts one of the finest and most comprehensive collections of its kind, with artwork ranging in date of composition from the French Revolution to World War I and representing the period’s major contributions, from Classicism to Wiener Sezession. The Old National Gallery contains three floors of exhibition space, where work is displayed according to themes organized by particular artistic movements, styles, or schools. Significant exhibits include the Goethe era, represented by artists such as Jakob Philipp Hackert, Wilhelm Schadow, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Caroline Bardua, Emma Körner, and Anton Graff. Examples of Romantic art include a number of paintings by the German master Caspar David Friedrich, as well as portraits by Philipp Otto Runge. The gallery’s collection of Impressionist paintings includes the work of Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, and Paul Cézanne. Among the sculptures displayed are pieces by Auguste Rodin and Johann Gottfried Schadow.