Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe

The heart of this collection was assembled by a woman with an unusually good eye: Karoline Luise, margravine of Baden, who in the 1760s and 1770s bought French, Dutch and Flemish paintings and kept careful records of every purchase. Her cabinet became the seed of the Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, the small planned city her family ruled.

Later directors turned it toward German art, and its treasure is a work by Matthias Grünewald, the Tauberbischofsheim altarpiece, a searing crucifixion from around 1523 by a painter who left only a handful of pictures behind. Around it hang Cranach, Dürer and Hans Baldung Grien, together with later German painting brought in by Hans Thoma, an artist who ran the museum around 1900 and gave much of his own work to it.