Städel Museum, Art museum in Frankfurt, Germany
The Städel Museum, officially Städelsches Kunstinstitut und Städtische Galerie, is an art museum on the Schaumainkai in Frankfurt. Its collection holds 3,100 paintings, 660 sculptures, over 4,600 photographs and more than 100,000 drawings and prints. The 1878 Neo-Renaissance building by Oskar Sommer was rebuilt in 1966 by Johannes Krahn, extended in 1990 by Gustav Peichl, and gained an underground wing by Schneider+Schumacher in 2012.
A Frankfurt banker founded the institution in 1816 as Germany's first museum foundation, initially displaying the collection in his private home. The building evolved over time and received a major expansion in the early 2000s.
The Städel's name comes from Johann Friedrich Städel, the banker and spice merchant who left his Roßmarkt house, collection and about 1.3 million guilders to found the institute. Since 1899 the Städelscher Museums-Verein, started by Frankfurter Zeitung publisher Leopold Sonnemann, has supported acquisitions and now counts over 9,000 members. The Paradiesgärtlein, a small oak panel painted between 1400 and 1420, entered the collection in 1922 as a loan from the Historisches Museum.
The museum sits directly along the river and is easy to reach on foot from downtown, making it convenient to include in a walking route. Plan to spend several hours to explore the collection properly without hurrying through the galleries.
The 2012 underground wing by Schneider+Schumacher added 3,000 m², raising display space from 4,000 to 7,000 m². Its ceiling holds 195 round skylights, each about 1.5 m across, set in a grid; from the garden above they read as light wells, and they light the contemporary galleries below without artificial lamps by day.
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