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| Established | 1972 |
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| Location | Gdańsk,Poland |
| Type | National museum |
| Director | Jacek Friedrich, Ph.D. |
| Website | mng |
TheNational Museum in Gdańsk (Polish:Muzeum Narodowe w Gdańsku), established in 1972 inGdańsk (although the history goes back the third quarter of 19th century), is one of the main branches ofPoland's national museum system.
Its main location is in the old late-GothicFranciscanmonastery, which has been used to house exhibits since the end of the 19th century. During that period it was known asDanziger Stadtmuseum, which held a sizeable collection of historical works of art. In 1884, the collection was enlarged with exhibits from theDanziger Kunstgewerbemuseum when the two institutions merged.[1]
The core of the museum's collection constitutes the collection ofJacob Kabrun, which includes several thousand pictures, drawings and prints byEuropean masters from the end of the fifteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth centuries.[2]
After the end of theSecond World War, when the town turned Polish, 65% of the main building of the museum was destroyed and much of the museum's collections were lost, including all the numismatic exhibits as well as works of art from theFar East.[3] Also the library and some of the museum's records were lost or destroyed. The first post-war exhibition was opened in 1948 and the museum changed its name to "Pomeranian Museum in Gdańsk".
In 1956,Hans Memling's masterpieceLast Judgment returned to Gdańsk as well as part of the collections of paintings and prints.[4] Originally the museum was located in theOpatów Palace inOliwa and constituted theethnographic department of the museum. Since 1989, the palace houses the museum's collection ofmodern art.[5]
A number of other museums were established from the rich collections of the Pomeranian Museum, which include:National Maritime Museum (1960), the Archeological Museum (1962) and the Gdańsk Historical Museum (1971). In 1972, it was renamed as the National Museum in Gdańsk.
In 1974, two paintings, namely theAnthony van Dyck sketchThe Crucifixion, and thePieter Brueghel the Younger paintingWoman Carrying the Embers were stolen from the museum. In the case of the Brueghel painting, its theft was discovered when a museum employee accidentally knocked its frame from the wall, revealing the canvas on display to be a reproduction cut out of a magazine. It was later reported that a customs officer who had reported the illegal export of artworks through the port ofGdynia was set alight and killed shortly before he was to be interviewed by police, while authorities shut down the investigation into the thefts and the killing. In 2025, the Brueghel painting was finally located in theMuseum Gouda [nl] in the Netherlands, where it was being displayed on loan from a private collection.[6]
In 2017, 162,137 people visited the museum.[7]
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Currently the museum has seven departments:[8]
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