Ordrupgaard

Why it is renowned

Ordrupgaard holds one of Northern Europe's most important collections of French and Danish art of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with Monet, Renoir, Sisley, Pissarro, Manet, Gauguin, Courbet and Delacroix beside Hammershøi and L.A. Ring.¹ Zaha Hadid designed its extension in glass and black lava concrete, opened in 2005, and Snøhetta added a second, largely underground one in 2021.¹ Paintings Wilhelm Hansen sold in 1922 now hang at the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.¹ The museum also opens the house of the furniture designer Finn Juhl to visitors.²

The story

The insurance director Wilhelm Hansen and his wife Henny built the house between 1916 and 1918 to designs by Gotfred Tvede, with a park laid out by Valdemar Fabricius Hansen, and opened it in September 1918.¹ Hansen bought French paintings from 1916, often on the advice of the critic Théodore Duret.¹ After the bank crash of 1922 he sold about half of the French collection, and he rebuilt it from 1923 to 1933.¹ Henny Hansen left the house, the park and the collection to the Danish state in 1951, and the museum opened in 1953.¹

What to know it by

• The French CollectionRealism to Impressionism
• The Danish CollectionHammershøi and Danish art around 1900
• Zaha Hadid extension2005Zaha HadidGlass and black lava concrete
• Finn Juhl's HouseFinn JuhlThe designer's own house