Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister

Between 1748 and 1756, Landgrave Wilhelm VIII of Hesse-Kassel put his diplomats and agents to work as art buyers, sending them to Amsterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, Venice and Paris to bring home paintings by the hundred. A German prince with a soldier's career and a collector's eye, he chased the Dutch and Flemish masters above all, and within a few years he had gathered roughly 800 pictures.

That taste still defines the gallery. Its heart is Rembrandt — around a dozen of his paintings hang here, one of the largest groups anywhere, among them Jacob Blessing the Sons of Joseph, a tender scene of the blind patriarch reaching to bless the wrong grandson, and an early portrait of Saskia, the painter's wife. Around them are Frans Hals and Anthony van Dyck, Rubens and Jacob Jordaens, with Italians and Germans including Titian and Dürer.

Since 1974 the collection has lived in Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, a neoclassical palace on a wooded hillside above Kassel, its galleries reached by climbing through the park the Landgraves laid out below, a park crowned by a colossal copper Hercules that has looked out over the valley since 1717.