The main emphasis in the Basel Historical Museum collection of paintings, drawings and prints is on the city of Basel and its region, and on the following categories and themes: Late Gothic panel painting (winged altarpieces), portrait and miniature painting, paintings from buildings in Basel (murals, wallpaper, furnishings), and images of the city, its buildings, its life and customs, and of particular events in the city's history and of its trades. In addition, there are special collections of family records and of designs and cartoons for stained-glass windows. Criteria for collection, apart from artistic quality, include subject-matter, value as historical evidence, and original use and provenance.
These works make use of a great variety of materials and techniques, including painting on panel, canvas, metal, glass, parchment and paper; pastels, gouache, silverpoint drawings and various printing techniques including early photography are also represented. About one third of the roughly 450 paintings (in oil on panel or canvas) are permanently exhibited.
Some 350 of the paintings are portraits, primarily of Basel citizens, from the 17th to the early 20th century. The collection constitutes a gallery of ancestral portraits representing the history of the city republic and its leading families and personages. The captured presence of its former citizens gives continued life to the city's past. The predominance of portraiture in the collection, as compared to genre, landscape or religious painting, manifests the general demand for this kind of art among the Protestant citizens, and the lack of commissions from the Church or secular institutions for other subjects. The quality of the portraits is uneven, reflecting the judgement of a contemporary (C.G. Küttner) of 1779, that Basel was a splendid place for portrait painters, since «they all found work, from the good to the mediocre to the very worst». In the portrait collection alone – excluding «Kleinmeister» engravings and miniatures – about 90 different painters of Swiss, German, Bohemian, Dutch and Italian origin are represented. In this way the collection's emphasis on local people is supplemented by an international dimension.
In the graphic art collection the illustrations of lost or fragmented art treasures of Basel have special documentary value: for example, those of the Burgundian spoils sold in 1504, or of the Basel Dance of Death, destroyed in 1805, or of the Cathedral Treasury, partly auctioned in 1836.
