The museum owes its existence to the Marquis of Vega-Inclan, a diplomat, collector, and cultural patron who spent decades assembling furniture, paintings, and decorative objects from Spain's Romantic period, roughly the 1820s through the 1860s. He opened the museum on June 1, 1924, as the Museo Romantico, in a late 18th-century townhouse that itself evoked the domestic world he wanted to preserve. The Spanish state purchased the building in 1927, and when the Marquis died in 1942, his entire collection was bequeathed to the nation. In 2009, the museum was formally renamed the Museo Nacional del Romanticismo, a more precise title that acknowledged its scope had always been national rather than personal.

Unlike conventional galleries where paintings hang on neutral walls, the Museum of Romanticism presents its collection within furnished rooms that recreate the domestic life of the era. There is a dining room with a set table, a billiard room, sitting rooms with period furniture and wallpaper. Visitors move through these spaces not as spectators in a gallery but as guests in a 19th-century home, one whose inhabitants happened to collect art by Goya, Zurbaran, and Sorolla. Francisco de Goya's San Gregorio Magno hangs here, as does a portrait of the Marquis of Vega-Inclan by Joaquin Sorolla. The effect collapses the distance between art and life, placing masterworks in the context where their original owners would have encountered them: on the walls of their homes, between meals.

The collection tells the story of a turbulent era in Spanish history. Valeriano Dominguez Becquer's painting El conspirador carlista captures the paranoia of Spain's Carlist Wars. Jose Aparicio's grand canvas depicts the landing of Ferdinand VII at El Puerto de Santa Maria. Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz painted portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Rivas with the formal precision that characterized court painting of the period. Among the most personally revealing items are objects connected to Mariano Jose de Larra, the Romantic writer and journalist whose 1837 suicide at twenty-seven became a defining tragedy of Spanish literary Romanticism. His presence in the museum is a reminder that the passions displayed on these walls were not merely artistic conceits.

The museum sits in Madrid's Justicia neighborhood, on a side street far from the tourist crush of the Prado triangle. Its two-story townhouse, with an attic floor closed to the public, has the unassuming presence of a building that was designed for private life and never entirely gave up that character. Both the building and the collection were protected as a historical-artistic monument in 1962, ensuring that the rooms would remain as the Marquis arranged them. On any given afternoon, the museum is quiet enough to hear the floorboards creak, a rare thing in a city of three million where silence itself feels like an exhibit.