The story
In 1916 the heirs of Rasmus Meyer, a Bergen businessman and collector, gave his paintings to the city on one condition. Bergen had to build a public museum for them. The building that resulted, designed by the architect Ole Landmark, opened in 1924 beside Lille Lungegårdsvann, the small lake in the centre of town, and it still carries Meyer's name. Today it is one of the KODE museums, Bergen's group of art museums and composers' homes.
Meyer bought Norwegian art while the painters were still at work, and two floors follow it from around 1880 to 1920. Older landscapes by J. C. Dahl, the founder of Norwegian landscape painting, hang near the work of Harriet Backer, Christian Krohg and Nikolai Astrup, the generation that gave Norway its own modern painting.
The strongest presence is Edvard Munch. KODE describes its Munch holdings as the third largest in the world, and the Meyer rooms include Jealousy and Melancholy, along with Inger on the Beach from 1889, the painter's sister seated on the rocks at Åsgårdstrand, the coastal village where he spent his summers.
The building also keeps a piece of older Bergen. In the Blumenthal room, one of its historic Bergen interiors, paintings from around 1760 cover the walls and the ceiling.
