The story
Among the paintings J. F. Willumsen gave away to found this museum was one he had not painted himself, an Adoration of the Shepherds by El Greco from around 1567 to 1570, the Greek-born master's early years. Willumsen, one of the most distinctive figures in Danish modernism, studied El Greco for years and in 1927 published a book in Paris about the painter's youth.
He offered his works and his collection of older art to the Danish state and to Copenhagen, and in the end the museum was built in Frederikssund, a town on Roskilde Fjord north-west of the capital, whose municipality took on the gift. Designed by the architect Tyge Hvass, it opened in 1957, a year before Willumsen died at 94. Inside are his own paintings, sculptures, ceramics, prints and drawings, with sketchbooks and archives that follow him from Symbolism to his own kind of modernism. His large mountain picture Jotunheim, from 1892 to 1893, is here on deposit from the national gallery, the Statens Museum for Kunst.
After almost two years of rebuilding by Wohlert Arkitekter, the Danish firm known for the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the museum reopened on 7 September 2026, Willumsen's birthday, with a new entrance reached by a path past his monumental sculpture The Ravens.
