The story
The Fondation de l'Hermitage is a family house first. In 1841 the Lausanne banker Charles-Juste Bugnion bought an estate on a hill above the city, and in the 1850s the architect Louis Wenger built him a neoclassical mansion there, with a park looking out over the old town and its cathedral towards Lake Geneva. Bugnion's descendants gave the house and part of the park to the City of Lausanne in 1976.
It opened as an art venue in June 1984 with a show of Impressionist paintings from collections in French-speaking Switzerland, and that set its course. Two or three exhibitions a year fill the rooms of the old house, and over the decades they have brought Monet, Caillebotte, Bonnard, Hopper and Magritte up the hill. Around them a collection of its own has grown, almost entirely from gifts, bequests and long-term loans, and it now runs to several hundred works. It centres on French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting and on 20th-century artists from the canton of Vaud. In 1998 alone, gifts brought in pictures by Degas, Vuillard, Fantin-Latour, Braque and Suzanne Valadon. These works go on view in rotation, so what hangs in the house depends on the season.
