The Centraal Museum was founded in 1838 and is the oldest municipal museum in the Netherlands. The museum has an extensive collection of art, city history, fashion and applied art, which is largely owned by the municipality of Utrecht.

The collection contains around 50,000 objects. Due to lack of space and fragility, only a part can be exhibited in the museum buildings. The Centraal Museum has more than 60,000 works of art, such as the Dick Bruna collection, the Rietveld Schröder Archive, the Van Baaren collection and more.