The story
Mulhouse grew rich on printed cotton, and its fine arts museum lives in a house built on that trade. The Villa Steinbach was put up in 1788 for the fabric manufacturer Jean Vetter and later bought by the industrialist Georges Steinbach, whose heirs gave it in 1894 to the Société industrielle, the city's association of manufacturers. That same society had founded the museum in 1864 with the collector Frédéric Engel-Dollfus. The bombing of 1944 destroyed or damaged many works, and the paintings settled in the villa only in 1964, after the collection had passed to the city.
The strongest thread is local. Jean-Jacques Henner, born in a village in southern Alsace, has a gallery of his own here, among the largest groups of his work outside Paris, and his Woman on a Black Divan dates from 1865. Nearby hangs Flora and Zephyr, William Bouguereau's painting of the goddess of flowers and the west wind, from 1875. The rooms also reach back to the late Middle Ages, with a painted altarpiece from Rheinfelden on the Rhine. Among the 19th-century seascapes is one by Eugène Boudin, the Normandy painter who taught the young Monet to work outdoors, painted in 1894, four years before his death.
