The story
Climb the front steps on the Rue des Musées and look at the stair ramps, where carved stone animals keep watch. They belong to a building that La Chaux-de-Fonds, a watchmaking town high in the Swiss Jura, waited more than 60 years to get. A society of local art lovers began collecting in 1864, hoping to put good pictures in front of the town's craftsmen, and for decades the works moved between a casino foyer and a school. The building fund grew in 1899 with the legacy of Léon Gallet, a leading local watchmaker, and the museum finally opened in June 1926.
Its designers were the architect René Chapallaz and the painter Charles L'Eplattenier, the art-school teacher who trained the young Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, later known as Le Corbusier. They gave the town a neoclassical building with Art Deco touches, and it marked its centenary in 2026.
Much of the collection is Swiss art of the 19th and 20th centuries, with a strong showing of painters from the town itself. The room most visitors ask for came from a quiet local couple, René and Madeleine Junod, who left 30 paintings to the city in 1986, enough to make an extension by the architect Georges Haefeli necessary. There you find Pissarro's orchard at Pontoise from 1877, Gauguin's landscape at Le Pouldu, a late Renoir of his garden at Les Collettes, and a girl with tousled hair that van Gogh painted in 1888. The museum also owns an earlier van Gogh from his Dutch years, a peasant bent over the basket he is weaving.
