Wallraf–Richartz Museum

Cologne's oldest museum grew out of one obsessive collector and a rescue mission. Ferdinand Franz Wallraf, a priest and scholar, spent his life gathering the art of his home city as churches and monasteries were being dissolved around 1800, saving medieval panels that might otherwise have been scattered or lost. When he died in 1824 he left everything to Cologne, and a merchant, Johann Heinrich Richartz, later paid for the first museum building, so both names are over the door.

The heart of the collection is medieval Cologne itself, one of the richest holdings of late-Gothic painting anywhere. Its star is Stefan Lochner's Madonna in the Rose Bower from around 1450, a small, glowing panel of the Virgin among roses and tiny music-making angels, gold-backed and jewel-bright, a high point of the tender Cologne School.

From there the galleries move through Rembrandt, Rubens and Murillo into the 19th century, where a large loan from the Swiss collector Gérard Corboud added Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and put Fondation Corboud into the museum's name. The present home, a severe grey cube by the Cologne architect Oswald Mathias Ungers, opened in 2001 near the spot where Lochner himself once lived.