The story
When the art-loving citizens of St. Gallen opened their museum in October 1877, they had the architect Johann Christoph Kunkler model it on the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the grand picture gallery of the Bavarian kings. It was a bold ambition for a Swiss textile town in the country's east.
The collection they filled it with reaches from the late Middle Ages to the present, with particular depth in Dutch, German and French painting, and a print room holding sheets by Durer, Rembrandt and the etcher Jacques Callot. A private foundation has run it since 2012, and it remains the main picture gallery for eastern Switzerland, its neoclassical halls still lit from above much as Kunkler intended.
