The New Temple of Art. Riga City Art Museum 1905–1919
From 19 July to 9 November 2025, the exhibition The New Temple of Art. Riga City Art Museum 1905–1919 will be on display in the 4th floor exhibition halls of the Latvian National Museum of Art (Jaņa Rozentāla laukums 1, Riga). The exhibition is dedicated to the 120th anniversary of the opening of the museum’s main building, and will introduce visitors to the early history of the museum and its activities during the tenure of its first director, Wilhelm Neumann.
On 14 September 1905, the Riga City Art Museum was opened on the edge of the Esplanade Square — today known as the main building of the Latvian National Museum of Art. It was the first building in the Baltics constructed specifically for the needs of an art museum. Writing about the event the following day, an anonymous author in the Riga newspaper Rigasche Rundschau expressed hope that “the new stately building would be a true center of our artistic life not only externally, but also internally.” Meanwhile, painter Janis Rozentāls, in a multi-part review published in the journal Vērotājs, referred to the newly opened museum and the accompanying Baltic artists’ exhibition as the “new temple of art.”
The museum building was designed by architect and art historian Wilhelm Neumann (1849–1919), who also served as the first director of the Riga City Art Museum until early 1919, when painter Vilhelms Purvītis took over and a new stage of development began. Although the museum initially was named “Riga City,” its first director had ambitions to operate on a broader scale. This was symbolically reflected in commissioned artworks - six monumental paintings for the upper-floor vestibule by landscape artists Vilhelms Purvītis and Gerhard von Rosen, depicting urban and rural scenes from Vidzeme, Kurzeme, and Estonia. The Riga City Art Museum was established based on the City Art Gallery, whose collection primarily included samples from various Western European painting schools and very few works by local artists. Therefore, in developing the museum’s collection, Neumann focused on enriching it with works by 19th- and early 20th-century Baltic artists. The museum's exhibition policy included solo exhibitions of both past generations and internationally active contemporaries, memorial shows for recently deceased artists, larger research-based and to particular historical events dedicated exhibitions, as well as graphic art selections offered by international partners.
This exhibition offers visitors an in-depth look at the building specially constructed for the Riga City Art Museum, its first director and staff, several of the exhibitions held in the museum, and a selection of works by Latvian and Estonian artists that were once displayed together in the museum’s permanent collection, but are now stored across six different collections of the Latvian National Museum of Art. The exhibition will also feature Wilhelm Neumann’s sketches of the museum building and its interiors, historical photographs, and various other materials from the museum’s Scientific Documentation Center and Library collection.
