[1] It originated with the Société industrielle de Mulhouse (SIM), a learned society established in 1826 by local industrialists such as Dollfus, Koechlin, and Schlumberger, which had begun collecting artworks in 1831, and was founded in 1864 by Frédéric Engel-Dollfus.

[2][3][4] Since 1985, the museum is housed in a former hôtel particulier, the Villa Steinbach, which consists of a core from 1788 and a wing of 1924, added by the then owner, the SIM.

[7][3] Over half of the paintings still belong to the Société industrielle de Mulhouse and are on permanent loan to the museum.

)[9][10][11] The main focus of the collection is French art from (roughly) 1830 to 1930, with Alsatian painters active in France, such as Jean-Jacques Henner (of whom the museum owns 44 oil paintings),[12] Jean Benner, Emmanuel Benner, Camille Alfred Pabst, Gustave Brion, Marcel Rieder, Henri Zuber, Charles Walch... sharing the walls with Courbet, Isabey, Boudin, Bonnat, Martin, Cormon, Clairin, Laurens, Hébert, Merson, Marquet, and many others.

The museum also displays a small collection of old master paintings featuring artists from Italy (Sebastiano Ricci), the Dutch Republic (Jacob van Ruisdael), and Flanders (Pieter Brueghel the Younger, David Teniers the Younger) in addition to French masters (Hyacinthe Rigaud, François Boucher); a small collection of medieval Germanic paintings and sculptures (on loan from the Musée historique de Mulhouse); and post-WWII art, essentially from France (Aurélie Nemours).