Irma Stern Museum, artist museum in Cape Town, South Africa

The Irma Stern Museum is an art museum housed in a residential home in Cape Town that focuses on the work and life of a South African painter. The collection includes paintings, drawings, and the artist's personal assemblage of objects from Africa and the Orient, all displayed within the historic rooms of the former residence.

Irma Stern was born in Schweizer-Reneke in 1894 to German parents and trained in Germany under Max Pechstein before settling in Cape Town. She bought The Firs, a house in Rosebank, in 1927 and lived and worked there until her death in 1966. The University of Cape Town opened the house as a museum in 1971, keeping her studio, library and collection as she left them.

The museum displays the world of an artist who drew inspiration from African and Eastern traditions and incorporated these influences into her work. Visitors can see how personal collections and artworks are displayed side by side throughout the rooms, offering insight into how the artist lived and created.

The museum occupies a former family home in a residential part of Cape Town, so rooms are small and some passages narrow; it is reached on foot or by local transport rather than by dedicated visitor parking. Allow roughly an hour and a half to two hours to see the paintings and the objects gathered in the house.

The museum preserves not only artworks but also a remarkable collection of art objects from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia that the artist gathered throughout her life. This assemblage is woven into the rooms of the home itself, revealing how these diverse cultures shaped her artistic thinking.