Through major donations including Maximilian Speck von Sternburg, Alfred Thieme and Adolf Heinrich Schletter the collection grew with time.

In 1853, businessman and art collector Adolf Fer donated his collection under the condition that the city build a municipal museum within five years.

After the decision on the relocation of the Federal Administrative Court in Leipzig in May 1992, the museum had to move again in August 1997 into an interim site in Handelshof.

They designed a compact building mass framed by angled structures in the corners of the pre-war street block.

Today, the 34 meters high museum rises inside a court with outlets at every of the 4 sides and towers above those structures along the streets.

Important parts of the collection are works by Dutch and German Old Masters like Frans Hals and Lucas Cranach the Elder, Romantics like Caspar David Friedrich, and representatives of the Düsseldorf school of painting such as Andreas Achenbach.

These resulted historically from the GDR period and due to the tight financial situation of the city (the purchase of the museum's budget for 2005 amounted to only 75,000 euros) and can not easily made up.

The museum tries to address this problem by experimenting with unusual combinations of works from different eras, which aims to provide visitors with new perspectives.

On the occasion of the opening of the new museum building, in 2004 the art collector couple Dr. Hans-Peter Bühler and Marion Buehler-Brockhaus donated 41 works by French artists, including Jean-Baptiste Corot, Charles-François Daubigny, Jean-François Millet, Eugène Delacroix, Edgar Degas and Claude Monet.

Recently, the museum received from the BMW Group, which is culturally engaged since the new Leipzig plant in the city, the photo collection "AutoWerke" (Car Works).