The Hungarian National Museum was founded in 1802 when Count Ferenc Széchényi (father of István Széchenyi) requested the emperor’s permission to present his collections (containing some 15,000 books, 1200 manuscripts, 140 volumes of maps and copper engravings, 2000 gold coins and other antiquities, sculptures and portraits) to the nation.

Széchényi had cherished the idea of systematically developing the family library into a national collection for more than a decade: he had concentrated on purchasing Hungarian books and other Hungary-related materials to form the basis of a National-Bibliotheca. Its catalogue, Catalogus Bibliothecae Hungaricae, had been published in various volumes between 1799 and 1800, aspiring to outline the structure of “national knowledge”. Around the same time, other aristocratic libraries, those of the Radays, Orczys, Podmaniczkys, Telekis, were also opened to the public, turning their collections from private inoto public property. These efforts mirrored a type of Enlightenment Patriotism encountered in various European aristocratic circles.

Private foundations of this kind also aimed to immortalize the founder’s name: it was stipulated that the library, opened to scholars in 1804, should be named Bibliotheca Hungarica Familiae Comitum Széchényi Patriae Sacra. The National Museum served as a national library until 1949 when the two were divided; today the latter is called the National Széchényi Library.

Széchényi’s act of generosity was received by contemporaries as a “patriotic sacrifice” on the “altar of the fatherland”, while the National Museum itself was seen as a “temple” of national culture. The collection, with Palatine Joseph as its curator, was first placed in the Paulite monastery in Pest, then in the old university building. In 1807 it was officially taken into national ownership by the Diet declaring it a “national institution”. The Diet also urged the public to furnish additional donations; some two hundred of these were made by the 1830s, only 10 percent of which came from aristocrats, the majority from the gentry, the bourgeoisie and higher clergy. The Diet itself also purchased private collections for the Museum, like those of Miklós Jankovich (1772–1846) in 1836, which contained some 60,000 books, 1400 codices and 4000 charters, along with a large number of paintings, coins and other antiquities.

The National Museum was given permanent housing in a publicly funded building, constructed in neoclassicist style between 1837 and 1847 by Mihály Pollack. Following the Grecian style of the Berlin Museum and the British Museum, Pollack’s Museum was less national in its architectural design than in its intended cultural function. It opened to the public in 1848 and immediately came to play key symbolic and political roles. As legend has it (most probably falsely so), Sandor Petőfi during a rally on March 15 recited his Nemzeti dal (“National Song”) to the crowd on the steps in front of the Museum. (In 1890 a commemorative plaque was placed on the steps, which, as a historical site symbolizing national independence, still serves as the location for the annual state celebrations of the 1848 Revolution.) During the Independence War of 1848-49, the Upper House of the Parliament held its meetings in the Museum’s ceremonial hall. It continued to hold its sessions there until the completion of the new Neo-Renaissance Parliament building in the early 1900s. During the 1860-70s the entrance hall was decorated with historical frescos and murals by Károly Lotz and Mór Than, financed by the Vienna government in a goodwill gesture on the eve of the 1867 Compromise. Along with allegorical portrayals of culture and opulence, the paintings depict political leaders and culture-related scenes from Hungarian history from the age of St Stephen to the mid-19th century. In an effort characteristic of the post-1867 era, the painters intended to reconcile the contradictory ideological traditions of the Habsburg suzerainty (represented by Maria Theresa and Palatine Joseph) and the anti-Habsburg political movements (represented by Kossuth and Petőfi). A Museum Garden was established, funded by public charitable concerts held during the 1850-70s with the participation of Liszt among others. It soon turned into a miniature national pantheon as variously sized statues of Hungarian literati (Dániel Berszenyi, Ferenc Kazinczy, Sándor and Károly Kisfaludy, János Arany) as well as a bust of Giuseppe Garibaldi were placed there during the 1860-80s. (Garibaldi’s popularity in Hungary stemmed from a perceived family resemblance between the Hungarian and Italian national movements.)

As collections grew and specialization became inevitable, the National Museum was subdivided into different departments, many of which served as a basis for establishing further museums of national significance. The mineral collection donated in 1808 by the founder’s wife, Julia Festetics, formed the core of the future Museum of Natural History, which was established in 1933 by uniting the National Museum’s mineralogy, botany and zoology departments.

In 1846 the archbishop of Eger, János László (Johann Ladislaus) Pyrker (1772–1847, formerly Patriarch of Venice), donated his collection of some 200 paintings to the Museum. The Pyrker Gallery opened to the public in 1851 and was the first permanent exhibition of paintings within the National Museum. The art collections of the National Museum were further enriched by the Esterházy collection, formerly exhibited in Vienna and purchased by the Hungarian state in 1871, and the donation of Bishop Arnold Ipolyi in 1872. These collections paved the way for the founding of the Szépművészeti Múzeum (Museum of Fine Arts) in 1896, as part of the Millennial Celebrations. It was housed in a building on Heroes’ Square in neoclassicist style and opened in 1906. (On the opposite side of the square, another art gallery, Műcsarnok, or the Hall of Art, was established in 1896, with the Millennial Art Exhibition featuring a selection of 19th-century Hungarian art.)

The initial donations and purchases contained mostly Italian, Spanish and Flemish masterpieces and gravitated to an international baroque or classicist taste, hardly representative of what could have been taken as national art. From the 1850s onwards, however, a special collection was formed in the Picture Gallery of the National Museum, that of the Hungarian School. Initially, it contained some fifty paintings by Hungarian artists, including Károly Markó the Elder, Miklós Barabás, Károly Kisfaludy, Soma Orlai Petrics, Viktor Madarász and Mihály Zichy. Many of their works served as a basis for the Gallery of Hungarian History Paintings, founded within the National Museum in 1884.

From 1867 the National Museum was granted a considerable state subsidy. New acquisitions were mostly carried out by the director Ferenc Pulszky in his trips abroad. Artefacts of folk culture were increasingly musealized from the 1870s. The basis of the ethnographic collection of the Museum came from the expedition that the linguist, ethnographer and anthropologist Antal Reguly led to Siberia in the search of peoples related to the Magyars. He donated his collection, mainly Ob-Ugrian objects, to the Hungarian Academy in 1847. In 1871 János Xantus was appointed as the first curator of the Ethnographical Department of the Museum. Xantus travelled extensively in North America (during his exile in the 1850s) and South-East Asia (during his state-subsidized expedition in 1869-70), and his collections considerably enriched the Museum’s ethnographic collection. During the Millennial Celebrations in 1896, an open-air museum was created in the form of an ideal-typical Magyar village, where the folklorist, zoologist and ornithologist Ottó Hermann exhibited the artefacts of what he called the Hungarian arch-professions. (The Néprajzi Múzeum, or Museum of Ethnography, was formally taken out of the National Museum in the 1940s.)

As specialized institutions branched off from the National Museum, various other museums of national scope were established independently. The most significant is the Iparművészeti Muzeum (Museum of Applied Arts), founded in 1872. Modelled on similar institutions established in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, its historical collection was based on material acquired from the National Museum’s Department of Antiquities, while its contemporary collection was developed by purchases from the world fairs of the 1870-80s. Its building, combining Art Nouveau architecture with Hungarian folk-art ornamentation, was constructed between 1893 and 1896 and opened as part of the Millennial Celebrations.

A new type of museum, differing from national museums in scope and philosophy, that emerged in the late 19th century was the industrial museum. Modelled on the Technologisches Gewerbe-museum of Vienna, the Technológiai Iparmúzeum (Technological Industry Museum) of Budapest was founded in 1881 (its building was constructed in 1889), followed by several others all over the country in the following decades. It aimed to combine the functions of a trade school, an exhibition space and a trade location. As it had no storage space, it was not intended to accumulate objects or establish a canon, but to exhibit the most recent products of technological invention. It served, however, the state’s political and economic goals by promoting Hungarian industrial wares, fostering national commercial expansion.