Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection

On a Sunday afternoon in February 2008, three masked men walked into this Zurich villa, held the staff at gunpoint, and carried four paintings out to a waiting car. It was one of the largest art thefts ever recorded: a Cézanne, a Monet, a van Gogh and a Degas, together valued at more than 160 million dollars. The Monet and the van Gogh turned up days later in a car parked outside a psychiatric hospital nearby, and the Cézanne, "The Boy in the Red Vest," surfaced in Belgrade four years on.

The paintings all came from one man, Emil Bührle, a German-born industrialist who made his fortune selling arms from Zurich during and after the Second World War and spent it on French Impressionists. That fortune, and where some of the pictures came from, has kept the collection under scrutiny. Several works had been taken from Jewish owners under the Nazis, and the questions around them have never fully settled.

Since 2021 the core of the collection hangs in an extension of the Kunsthaus Zürich, the city's main art museum, where the wall texts now set out each painting's history beside its beauty.