The story
One of the oldest boats known anywhere sits in the Drents Museum in Assen. The Pesse canoe, a hollowed trunk of Scots pine just under 3 metres long, was found in the peat of this province and dates to roughly 8000 BC. Not far from it lies the Yde Girl, a teenager who died about 2,000 years ago and was found in 1897 in a bog near the village of Yde. Drenthe's peat preserved them both.
Peat runs into the art collection too. Vincent van Gogh spent the autumn of 1883 in Drenthe, wrote that its beauty overwhelmed him, and painted the bog country. His Peat Boat with Two Figures, laid in quickly with brush and palette knife, shows a barge and two peat cutters among the turf stacks. The museum bought it in 1997. It hangs in a collection centred on art from about 1885 to 1935, Jan Toorop among the painters, and on realist painting.
The museum, founded in 1854, spreads over a group of buildings on the site of a 13th-century nunnery, including its brick abbey church and the provincial government house begun in 1882. An extension by the Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat, finished in 2011, went largely underground. During the work an 18th-century coach house was lifted in one piece and set down on a glass plinth so that daylight reaches the galleries below. In January 2025 thieves blew open a side door at night and took the golden Helmet of Coțofenești and three Dacian bracelets on loan from the National History Museum of Romania. The helmet and two of the bracelets were recovered in April 2026.
