The story
In the Swiss town of Winterthur, an eye doctor named Arthur Hahnloser and his wife Hedy turned their home, the Villa Flora, into one of the great private collections of modern French painting. Between about 1906 and 1936 they bought Cézanne, van Gogh and Redon, and they befriended the living artists whose work they loved.
Two of those friends shaped the collection. Félix Vallotton and Pierre Bonnard, both close to the couple, sold them pictures, stayed in the house and treated it as a gathering place, so that the walls filled with the intimate interiors and gardens of the Nabis. Fauve canvases and Swiss painters like Ferdinand Hodler joined them.
After passing to a foundation, the villa was restored and reopened as part of the Kunst Museum Winterthur, the pictures back in the domestic rooms they were bought for.
