The story
Countess Wilhelmina von Hallwyl kept everything. In her house at Hamngatan 4 in central Stockholm, built between 1893 and 1898 by the architect Isak Gustaf Clason and fitted from the start with electricity, central heating, telephones and bathrooms, she gathered paintings, arms and armour, porcelain and silver alongside the ordinary objects of the household. In 1906 she began having all of it catalogued under her own strict supervision, and the work ended as 78 printed volumes covering some 50,000 objects.
The picture gallery is up in the attic, finished in 1905 after a large gift of money from her mother, Johanna Kempe. With the advice of her friend the painter Julius Kronberg she bought 139 oil paintings, almost all Dutch and Flemish from the late 1500s to the early 1700s. Among them is A Visit to the Art Dealer, painted on copper in 1636 by Frans Francken the Younger of Antwerp. The most expensive purchase of all, an Annunciation then believed to be by Rembrandt, is now catalogued as the work of an unknown master, probably of the 18th century.
She gave the house and everything in it to the Swedish state about a decade before her death in 1930, on condition that it stay unchanged, and it opened as a museum in 1938 with the family's rooms still arranged as they had lived in them.
