The story
When the museum in Vevey opened in March 1897, one of its attractions was a stuffed giraffe. The building, paid for by a bequest from Fanny Jenisch, the widow of a Hamburg senator who had spent happy holidays in the town, began as an encyclopedic museum, with natural history, antiquities, a library and classrooms under one neoclassical roof. Its façade carries a copy of the Parthenon frieze from Athens.
The scientific collections moved out in 1985, and since the late 1980s the museum has been devoted to fine art, above all to works on paper. It houses the Cantonal Department of Prints, one of Switzerland's major print collections, and the Oskar Kokoschka Foundation, set up by the Austrian painter's widow Olda, with more than 2,300 of his works. Kokoschka spent his last decades in nearby Villeneuve.
Another painter who ended his life by the lake is here too. Gustave Courbet spent his exile from France in La Tour-de-Peilz, next door to Vevey, and died there in 1877. In 1914 his sister Juliette gave the museum two of his late paintings, Sunset on Lake Geneva and The Terrace of Bon-Port, named after the lakeside house where he lived.
