Winterthur Museum of Art

Winterthur is a modest industrial city near Zurich, and its art museum has always outweighed its size, because the local industrialists who ran the town's engine and insurance firms collected seriously and gave generously. Founded on a 19th-century art society, the museum grew on private gifts rather than a royal or state collection.

The strength is late 19th- and 20th-century painting. You find a fine group of French and Swiss modern art, with Bonnard, Vallotton and Hodler among them, collected by townspeople who bought living artists. The holdings are now split across neighbouring buildings, including a purpose-built gallery and the older Villa Flora nearby.

For a city better known for its locomotive works, the concentration of first-rate modern painting comes as a surprise, gathered by a handful of families over a few generations.