The story
When the collector Oskar Reinhart opened this house to his home town of Winterthur in 1951, it became the first collector's museum in Switzerland. Reinhart had inherited a Swiss trading fortune and spent a lifetime buying pictures, and during his own life he handed a large part of the collection to the city.
The building is a former grammar school beside the city park, and what fills it is the German-speaking art Reinhart loved: some 500 works by Swiss, German and Austrian hands, running from early Romanticism through 19th-century Realism, along with a large collection of drawings. Alongside them hang portrait miniatures and a group of Dutch Golden Age works that arrived by later bequest.
By number of works this is the larger of the two Reinhart collections in Winterthur. The French and older European masterpieces, about 200 of them, which he left to the Swiss Confederation, hang a short way off in his former villa, Am Römerholz.
