The story
Finland's finest collection of old European painting sits in a Helsinki house that once belonged to a brewing family. Paul Sinebrychoff, who ran the family brewery, and his wife Fanny, a former actress, spent the early 1900s buying old masters and hundreds of portrait miniatures, guided by careful research and long correspondence with dealers.
In 1921 they gave the whole collection to the Finnish state, still the largest single art donation the country has received. Part of the building is kept as their home, its rooms furnished as an upper-class household of the period, so you move between a house museum and a picture gallery.
The paintings run from the 1300s to the mid-1800s, Dutch, Flemish, Italian and Swedish. The collection of portrait miniatures, easy to overlook, is among the finest in northern Europe and one of the museum's real rarities.
