The story
Langmatt is a house, not a palace. Sidney and Jenny Brown built the villa in the spa town of Baden around 1900 and filled it with French Impressionists, the fortune coming from the electrical-engineering firm Brown, Boveri that would later grow into ABB. The family lived here for two generations before leaving the house and its roughly 50 paintings to the town in 1987.
The collection punches well above the building's size, with Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Degas and Corot hung as they were in a lived-in home rather than a gallery.
In 2023 the museum made international news by selling three of its Cézannes at auction in New York, raising some 40 million Swiss francs to keep its doors open, a decision many in the art world called short-sighted. The remaining pictures went back on view after a renovation, still in the rooms the Browns furnished for them.
