Located at Elisabethstraße 1, it hosts the ‘Old Masters Gallery’ or old master painting collection of the Oldenburg State Museum of Art and Cultural History, featuring Dutch, Italian, German, and French paintings from the 15th to 18th centuries.

Nikolaus Friedrich Peter further expanded the collection and established the Augusteum as a public picture gallery.

In 1908, the Expressionists Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel held their first joint exhibition at the Augusteum.

In a series of sales, a third of the former Grand Ducal Picture Gallery was sold off, which was exported to the Netherlands with the assistance of industrialist Georg Bölts.

These works included valuable paintings by notable artists, such as Rembrandt van Rijn.