19th Century

From its inauguration in 1929 until the 1950s, the Lenbachhaus primarily presented paintings from nineteenth-century Munich and German art of the first half of the twentieth century. Together with the villa’s representative rooms and the art of the “prince of painters” Franz von Lenbach, these early mainstays define the collection’s historic core.

The collection is enhanced by eminent bequests and permanent loans: the body of works by Johann Georg von Dillis held by the Historic Society of Upper Bavaria, the Christoph Heilmann Foundation with paintings by the German Romantics and the artists of the Barbizon school, the collection of the Munich Secession, and the estate of Thomas Theodor Heine, the founder of "Simplicissimus".