The story
In 1864, while the ceiling of the little All Saints chapel in Grenchen, near Solothurn, was being restored, a battered panel riddled with woodworm came to light. It proved to be a Madonna painted in 1522 by Hans Holbein the Younger, then working in Basel. Today it is the treasure of the Kunstmuseum Solothurn. The Virgin sits enthroned with the Christ child, flanked by Saint Martin giving alms to a beggar and Saint Ursus, the town's patron, in armour. A heavy repainting soon after its discovery covered much of it, and only a restoration in 1971 brought back as much of Holbein's surface as survived. The museum also holds the Madonna in the Strawberries, painted about a century earlier by an unnamed Upper Rhine master.
The museum opened in 1902, sharing its building with a natural history collection that moved out around 1980. Much of its modern art came from a brother and sister in Solothurn, the collectors Josef Müller and Gertrud Dübi-Müller, whose foundations keep their works here, with Cézanne, Hodler and Matisse among them.
Gertrud was about 20 when she bought Vincent van Gogh's portrait of Trabuc, the chief attendant at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, and it became the cornerstone of her collection. Gustav Klimt's Goldfish, another of the museum's best-known pictures, came to her from her husband Otto Dübi, probably as an engagement present.
