The museum dates back to the year 1824, when the comprehensive collection of medieval art from Ferdinand Franz Wallraf came to the city of Cologne by inheritance.

Also in 2001, Swiss collector Gérard Corboud gave his impressionist and postimpressionist collection of over 170 works to the museum as a permanent loan.

[3] The Wallraf-Richartz-Museum houses an altarpiece (1515) from the Great Saint Martin Church in Cologne, one of the few known works by Jacob van Utrecht.

Among other early Renaissance works in the collection are the Adoration of the Child by an unknown artist; previously thought to have been painted by Hieronymus Bosch, and a panel of the Jabach Altarpiece by Albrecht Dürer.

[4] The Wallraf-Richartz collection includes works by the Impressionists Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte, and Berthe Morisot, whose Child among staked roses or "Kind zwischen Stockrosen", was painted in 1881.