Ordrupgaard Museum

Wilhelm Hansen made a fortune in insurance and between 1916 and 1918 bought French art at speed and with a good eye, and although he had to sell much of it in a banking crash he kept and rebuilt a collection that came to the state in 1953. It is one of the better French nineteenth-century collections in northern Europe: Corot, Courbet, Manet, Degas, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, Gauguin and Matisse, hung in the family's own house alongside a strong Danish holding from the Golden Age to the twentieth century. Zaha Hadid added a curving black concrete extension in 2005, and in the garden stands Finn Juhl's own house, preserved with his furniture, along with an underground gallery opened in 2021 and a sculpture park.

History

Ordrupgaard was built in 1916-1918 as the country home of the insurance magnate Wilhelm Hansen and his wife Henny, to designs by Gotfred Tvede, with a park laid out by Valdemar Fabricius Hansen; at its inauguration on 14 September 1918 Hansen announced that the collection would be left to the state. In 1922 the collapse of Landmandsbanken, from which his consortium had borrowed to buy art, forced him to sell more than half of his French collection, about 82 works including important pieces by Cézanne, Manet and Gauguin, many now in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, but from 1923 to 1933 he rebuilt it with new French paintings. After his death in 1936 Henny lived on at Ordrupgaard, and at her death in 1951 she left the collection, house and park to the state, which opened it as a museum in 1953. Zaha Hadid's extension of glass and black lava concrete was inaugurated on 30 August 2005, and a largely underground extension by Snøhetta on 13 August 2021 (Wikipedia, Ordrupgaard).

What's there

• French nineteenth-century painting - Manet, Degas, Monet, Cezanne and Gauguin.
• Zaha Hadid's extension - a curved black concrete wing of 2005.
• Finn Juhl's house - the designer's own home kept as he furnished it.
• The park and sculpture garden - grounds running down toward the forest.

When to go

April to October for the garden and Finn Juhl's house, which has limited winter opening. Two to three hours. Closed Mondays. Combine with Dyrehaven, the deer park, which is next door.

Good to know

It is out of the city and the last stretch is by bus or a long walk. Finn Juhl's house has separate limited opening hours and small group sizes. Parts of the collection travel, so key paintings may be away. The cafe is expensive.

Nearby

Jaegersborg Dyrehave is next door; Charlottenlund and the coast are east.

Key facts