Centraal Museum

Utrecht's Centraal Museum, founded in 1838, is the oldest municipal museum in the Netherlands, and it tells the story of one city across art, history and design under one roof.

Its paintings run to Utrecht's own specialities. Jan van Scorel brought the Italian Renaissance north in the 1500s, and a century later a group of local painters, the Utrecht Caravaggists, came home from Rome having learned Caravaggio's dramatic candlelight, among them Hendrick ter Brugghen and Gerard van Honthorst.

The museum also holds the world's largest collection of the furniture and drawings of Gerrit Rietveld, the Utrecht designer of the red-blue chair, and it looks after his Schröder House nearby, a 1924 landmark of the De Stijl movement. In a quieter wing it keeps the archive of Dick Bruna, the Utrecht illustrator who drew the small white rabbit Miffy.