Franz Mayer-Traumann Altschu was born in 1882 in Mannheim, Germany, and arrived in Mexico in 1905. The Mexican Revolution drove him away temporarily, but he returned for good in 1913 - the same year he married Maria Antonieta de la Macorra, who died shortly after. Mayer never remarried and had no children. What he had instead was a growing obsession with the material culture of his adopted country. He began collecting textiles as early as 1905, sending Mexican rebozos and blankets to family and friends in Europe as gifts. Fine art purchases through auction houses started in 1933; books followed, including various editions of Don Quixote. Talavera ceramics entered the collection in 1943. He even cultivated orchids, cacti, and azaleas, tended by a gardener named Felipe Juarez. In 1963, Mayer established a trust with the Bank of Mexico to ensure his collection would outlive him. When he died in 1975, the donation was finalized. The museum opened eleven years later.

The museum occupies the former San Juan de Dios monastery and hospital, a building whose own history stretches back further than the collection it houses. Originally built as a flour mill, the structure was converted into a hospital founded by Dr. Pedro Lopez in 1582 - the first medical doctor to graduate from the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico. Known as the Hospital for the Helpless, it served patients from nearly all of New Spain's social castes for roughly four hundred years, passing from the Lopez family to the Dominicans to the Brothers Hospitallers of St. John of God. The hospital's church was dedicated to the Three Wise Men. When the building was rehabilitated to house Mayer's collection, the 18th-century structure gained yet another life - a place where objects spanning the 15th through 20th centuries sit in rooms that have witnessed five centuries of continuous use.

The collection resists easy categorization. The silver holdings alone contain nearly 1,300 pieces from the 15th through 19th centuries - censers, chalices, candlesticks, and ciboriums worked in repousse, filigree, and graffito, many set with precious stones or enriched with gold and enamel. The textile collection is among the most varied in Mexico, beginning with Mayer's rebozos and expanding to include Saltillo blankets, Flemish tapestries, Manila shawls, and liturgical garments embroidered with gold and silver thread. Paintings span European and Mexican traditions displayed side by side - a rarity among museums. European works include pieces by Jose de Ribera, Francisco de Zurbaran, Lorenzo Lotto, and Alessandro Allori. Colonial Mexican painters like Juan Correa and Miguel Cabrera hang near a landscape by Jose Maria Velasco and an early work by Diego Rivera. At any given time, only about a quarter of the total holdings are on display; the rest circulate to other institutions on loan.

What makes the Franz Mayer Museum unusual is not just what it contains but what its collection represents: the survival of objects that were never meant to last. Decorative arts - textiles, pottery, furniture, everyday ceramics - are the artifacts most often lost to time, discarded when fashions change or materials wear out. Few collectors in Mexico thought them worth preserving. Mayer did, and his persistence created a record of material culture that would otherwise have vanished. In 2016, the museum expanded that mission by opening the Ruth D. Lechuga Center for Popular Art Studies in its basement, housing over 14,000 artifacts and 5,000 books documenting the anthropologist's research on Mexico's indigenous populations - a collection that traces Lechuga's life from her family's flight from the Nazi Anschluss in Austria to decades devoted to studying Mexican folk traditions. Together, the Mayer and Lechuga collections make an argument that the objects people use every day deserve the same reverence given to fine art.