Old National Gallery

▪ museum, Berlin, Germany

German  Alte Nationalgalerie 

      art museum in Berlin, Ger., noted for its collection of 19th-century European painting and sculpture.

      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, and the New National Gallery in 1968) and to the relative age of its collection. The works by 19th-century German artists are particularly noteworthy. 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 (Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von) era, represented by artists such as Jakob Philipp Hackert, Wilhelm Schadow, and Anton Graff. Examples of Romantic (Romanticism) art include a number of paintings by the German master Caspar David Friedrich (Friedrich, Caspar David), as well as portraits by Philipp Otto Runge. The gallery's collection of Impressionist (Impressionism) paintings includes the work of Édouard Manet (Manet, Édouard), Claude Monet (Monet, Claude), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (Renoir, Pierre-Auguste), Edgar Degas (Degas, Edgar), and Paul Cézanne (Cézanne, Paul). Among the sculptures displayed are pieces by Auguste Rodin (Rodin, Auguste) and Johann Gottfried Schadow (Schadow, Gottfried).

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