As state governor, he founded in Innsbruck a committee to establish a "Patriotic Museum for Tyrol", which later became the Tyrolean State Museum also known as the Ferdinandeum. As early as 1800, Archduke John had had the idea of this epochal project - as a "collection of all provincial products, which should serve as a model for the rest of the hereditary states". As a result of the Napoleonic Wars, it was not established until 1823, a decade after the Universalmuseum Joanneum was opened in Styria.
