The elder William Singer had built a Bessemer steel mill in Pittsburgh and sold it at exactly the right moment. The younger William wanted no part of it. He married Anna Spencer-Brugh in 1895 and moved to the artist colony on Monhegan Island, off the coast of Maine, to paint seascapes. His father, disappointed but not enraged, made a single condition: if his son was going to be an artist, he was going to earn his keep as one. The seascapes sold. By 1901 the couple was in Paris, studying at the Académie Julian. The Laren artist colony in the Netherlands then drew them in - it had become famous through painters like Jozef Israëls, Anton Mauve, Jacob Maris, and Albert Neuhuys - and they decided to settle. They built a house called De Wilde Zwanen, the Wild Swans, on the Oude Drift, and stayed.

The Laren School was a quieter cousin of the Hague School. Its painters worked in the soft greys and browns of the Gooi countryside, sentimental and observed, less dramatic than the impressionists and less austere than the modernists who would follow. The Singers were generous patrons. They knew Max Liebermann, who summered in the area in the company of Isaac Israëls. They knew the pointillists Co Breman and Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig. They travelled to Norway with the American painter Martin Borgord. They befriended Walter Griffin, Henri Le Sidaner, and the Dooijewaard brothers. The collection that William built was, in essence, a wall full of friends and contemporaries: Barbizon and Laren landscapes, French and Dutch impressionism, eventually expanding into the modernist movements that came after his death.

William died in 1943, in the middle of a war that had left the Netherlands occupied. Anna Singer survived him by almost twenty years. In 1954 she founded the Singer Memorial Foundation, and in 1956, with the Dutch architect Wouter Hamdorff, she opened the museum: a glass-walled extension of De Wilde Zwanen, with a concert hall attached because Anna believed that music belonged in the same room as paint. She died in 1962. The museum kept growing. A major architectural reconstruction opened in 2017, designed by Sanne Oomen of denieuwegeneratie - The New Generation - together with Oscar Vos and Thomas Dieben, in collaboration with VDNDP architecten. Singer Laren today holds work by Bart van der Leck, Jan Sluijters, Leo Gestel, Chris Beekman, Jan Toorop, Else Berg, Mommie Schwarz, Gustave De Smet, and Herman Kruyder, alongside the original Singer collection of Laren and Barbizon painting. About 300,000 visitors a year find their way out to it.

On 30 March 2020, in the small hours of the morning, a burglar smashed the museum's glass front door with a sledgehammer and walked out with a single painting. It was The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1884 in the village in North Brabant where his father served as Protestant minister. The painting was small, oil on paper laid on panel, and it was on loan to Singer Laren from the Groninger Museum. The Netherlands had been in COVID-19 lockdown for two weeks. The museum was closed and empty. The thief, later identified, took less than three minutes inside. The painting then vanished into the European criminal art market for three and a half years. A Dutch art detective named Arthur Brand quietly tracked it. In September 2023 it was handed back to him, wrapped in a pillowcase inside an IKEA bag. The painting was damaged but recoverable. It went home to Groningen.

Laren is not, on a map, a place that should hold this much art. It is a small commuter village in the Gooi region east of Amsterdam, with about 12,000 people and an old village green and a Catholic church. The artist colony came here in the 1870s because the rents were cheap and the light off the heath was good for landscape work, and the colony stayed long enough to leave an institution behind. Singer Laren is what remains of that century. The museum runs a busy concert programme in the hall that Anna insisted on, hosts the annual outdoor sculpture biennale in the surrounding gardens, and continues to mount the kind of mid-sized exhibitions - Mondrian, Henri Le Sidaner, Helene Schjerfbeck - that you would not necessarily expect to find in a town of this size. The new director, Doede Hardeman, took over on 1 November 2025.