The story
The Dordrechts Museum, founded in 1842, is one of the oldest museums in the Netherlands, begun by five local collectors in a town that had its own school of painters in the Golden Age. Its strength is homegrown: the light-filled river landscapes of Aelbert Cuyp, born in Dordrecht, and work by Rembrandt's pupils Nicolaes Maes, Ferdinand Bol and Samuel van Hoogstraten, all Dordrecht men.
The museum also holds the world's largest collection of Ary Scheffer, the Dordrecht-born painter who became a star of French Romanticism in Paris. A renovation finished in 2010 joined the old galleries, housed in a former mental asylum, to a new wing, so 17th-century Cuyps and 19th-century Scheffers now hang a few rooms apart.
