Louwman Museum

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lowman Museum in The Hague (exterior view)

The Louwman Museum , formerly Nationaal Automobiel Museum ( German  National Automobile Museum ) and then Louwman Museum is a museum of historic cars , coaches and motorbikes in The Hague in the Netherlands .

The museum

The entrance to the museum when it was still in Raamsdonksveer

The Louwman Collection is on display in the museum , a private collection of vintage cars , including vehicles from Bugatti , Isotta Fraschini , Hispano-Suiza and Duesenberg . It contains around 300 exhibits and is internationally oriented. The museum has the largest automobile collection in the world from the period up to 1910. It shows a large number of the 15 classics of the historic Dutch brand Spyker that still exist , including the Spyker 60 HP from 1903, the first all-wheel drive automobile with an internal combustion engine . The museum owns a Winston Churchill car and the Aston Martin that James Bond drives in the film Goldfinger from the period after World War II .

The Louwman Collection is one of the world's oldest private collections and was put together by two generations of the Louwman family. The collection began in 1934 when the then Dodge importer Pieter Louwman bought a 1914 Dodge . The current owner of the collection is Pieter's son Evert Louwman , the Dutch importer of Lexus , Toyota , Chrysler and Suzuki .

The 1903 Spyker 60 HP in the Louwman Collection

The museum was located in Leidschendam until 1980 , then in Raamsdonksveer until 2009 . Since July 3, 2010, the collection, again under the name of a Dutch Automobile Museum, has been in a new building in The Hague designed by the American architect Michael Graves , where the rest of the dissolved Rosso Bianco Collection was also integrated into the exhibition .

In 2010, the museum director Ronald Kooyman transferred a surviving Toyota AA , which had been converted from left-hand to right-hand drive , from the vicinity of Vladivostok to the museum.

Rosso Bianco

Louwman came under fire in connection with the old-timer racing car collection Rosso Bianco, which had been dissolved in Aschaffenburg , because after several unsuccessful attempts he seemed to enable the previous owner to preserve his entire collection in the future and subsequently received the collection transferred almost free of charge, however without a contractual obligation to preserve the collection.

In the meantime, a large number of the vehicles from Louwman's Rosso Bianco collection have been auctioned. Only a tiny part (around 15 exhibits) of the earlier Rosso Bianco vehicles is still on display in the Louwman Collection (as of March 2008).

See also

Web links

Commons : Louwman Museum  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. FAZ from January 4, 2011, page T5: The oldest Toyota in the world is now in Holland
  2. Source: “Market for Classic Automobiles and Motorcycles”, 2006.


Coordinates: 51 ° 42 ′ 57 ″  N , 4 ° 53 ′ 9 ″  E