Twente National Gallery

About

Jan Bernard van Heek, a textile industrialist from Twente, wants his painting collection to form the core of a national museum, and in 1930 that museum opens on the Lasondersingel in Enschede. The building, designed in 1929 by Anton Beudt and Karel Muller at the Van Heek family's request, first hangs roughly 140 works — mostly paintings — that Van Heek donated at its founding. Between 1994 and 1996 the museum undergoes a major renovation, during which architect Ben van Berkel adds a new exhibition hall and café. Then, on 13 May 2000, the Enschede fireworks disaster tears through the city and badly damages the building; the museum stays closed through repairs until it reopens on 14 April 2002. Today its holdings range from Jacob van Ruisdael's seventeenth-century landscapes to twentieth-century work by Karel Appel and Armando. Since 1965 the museum has also held the Art & Project collection, some thousand contemporary works strong, and in 2022 it welcomed 54,722 visitors.