A beautiful Swiss collection outside the walls
About the exhibition "Masterpieces from the Langmatt Museum. Boudin, Renoir, Cézanne, Gauguin..." visible at the Fondation de l'Hermitage in Lausanne until November 3, then in Cologne and Vienna in 2025.
Light! The exhibition "Masterpieces from the Langmatt Museum" held at the Fondation de l'Hermitage in Lausanne until November 3 is one of those exceptional events that modern art lovers love. A certainty of finding big names reassuring since everyone knows them. A rare opportunity to admire the works of art purchased by a Swiss couple outside the usual setting where they are visible, namely the Langmatt Museum, which was the couple's personal villa in Baden, custom-built by the architect Karl Moser and currently under construction. And the captivating pleasure of feeling like you're getting to know two rich collector lovers who were also in love with French art. It's a dream... Indeed, on the walls of Lausanne, there are real Impressionist treasures, acquired mainly between 1908 and 1919 by Sidney and Jenny Brown, who scoured Parisian art galleries and public sales, notably advised by the art dealer Ambroise Vollard and the collector Georges Viau, thus constituting one of the most prestigious collections in Europe with major works by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas... The icing on the cake: with its large bay windows, the Fondation de l'Hermitage wonderfully captures the play of light that so preoccupied the Impressionist painters, recreating an atmosphere worthy of their research.
The paintings on display in Lausanne include Auguste Renoir’s La barque (circa 1878) and Claude Monet’s Les Glaçons, effet de crépuscule (1893), as well as more intimate and all the more moving works such as Renoir’s La Natte and a nude by Degas. This exhibition celebrates not only the 150th anniversary of the Impressionist movement, but also the importance of the collection of Sidney Brown (1865-1941) and Jenny née Sulzer (1871-1968), who bought these works of art for sale at a time when Impressionism was still considered an avant-garde movement. So at their own risk, financially speaking. They didn’t care. They had the means, so they bought the paintings they liked. And the height of romanticism: it was during their honeymoon in Paris, after their marriage in 1896, that they had completely fallen in love with French art. By first buying two paintings at the Georges Bernheim art gallery: a Landscape by Paul-Désiré Trouillebert in the spirit of Camille Corot, and Washers on the banks of the Touque by Eugène Boudin.
As Guillaume Morel writes in the September issue of Connaissance des arts, "after their first Parisian crushes, it was with artists from the Munich Secession that Sidney and Jenny Brown-Sulzer began their collection. They went to Germany every year and bought paintings by Franz von Stuck, Leo Putz, and Julius Exter. To present them, they had an annex built in 1904 with a library and a gallery lit by a skylight. » But in the end, they sold almost all of that, to devote themselves to French art from 1908.
It must be said that at the time, French painting was actually very trendy in Switzerland. The Brown-Sulzers, for example, had friends, the Hahnlosers, who bought works of art by Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse… You get the idea. Still, Sidney and Jenny were the first Swiss collectors to have bought a painting by Cézanne and another by Gauguin in 1908. And there you have it. To top it all off, it was the same year that they met Matisse in his studio in Paris, where they also met the famous Sergei Shchukin, the Russian collector who built the most impressive collection of modern art in the world between 1898 and 1914 and who was just then starting to take a serious interest in the painter. Enough to motivate them. So here are our Swiss lovers leaving with three studies of female nudes in ink, signed Matisse.
Later, they would rather fall for a Fragonard, which would cost them eight impressionist paintings, and then they would also become passionate about Chinese ceramics from the Han dynasty to the Qing dynasty, Asian carpets, goldwork, Venetian vedutism, French furniture from the 18th century… In short, they were not likely to get tired of it.
A quick rewind: why were they rich, anyway? Sidney Brown was a Swiss engineer and businessman, from the famous Brown family, co-founders of the company "Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC)", which later became ABB, a giant in electrical technology. Jenny Sulzer came from the wealthy industrial Sulzer family, another important dynasty in Swiss industry. But she, as a bonus, had trained as a painter in Munich. The couple, married in 1896, therefore shared a common passion for art. The Brown-Sulzers thus built up one of the finest collections of French art in Switzerland at the turn of the 20th century. Today, they are spoken of as enlightened patrons and collectors, well ahead of their time, since at that time, Impressionism was not yet recognized in all artistic spheres as a major movement.
When the couple built a magnificent house on a large grassy area in the town of Baden near Zurich in 1900, namely the Villa Langmatt (from the German word that translates as long meadow or large grassy expanse), it was not just to live there. The villa was also intended to serve as a showcase for their art collection. They also organized private exhibitions there and hosted artists and intellectuals of their time. Sidney and Jenny had therefore meticulously selected works that reflected their sensitivity and admiration for the avant-gardes of the late 19th century.
After Sidney Brown's death in 1941, Jenny Sulzer continued to enrich and preserve their collection. When she died in 1968, their artistic legacy became a precious part of Swiss heritage. In accordance with the couple’s wishes, Villa Langmatt became a museum in 1990. Today, the Langmatt Museum houses their exceptional collection of Impressionist art and period furniture, allowing visitors to immerse themselves in the couple’s artistic and cultural world. The villa itself, with its elegant architecture and beautiful park, is a perfect example of the bourgeois lifestyle of art collectors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Langmatt Museum in Baden is currently closed for a complete renovation, scheduled to last until spring 2026. This renovation includes major improvements to the building and the park surrounding the villa, and during the closure, a selection of around 50 Impressionist paintings, including works by Renoir, Monet and Cézanne, is touring several European museums. An initiative that keeps the collection visible: Sidney and Jenny would have been pleased. History does not say, however, whether they would have appreciated it if the sale of three of their Cézanne paintings at Christie's in 2023 had enabled them to raise the funds needed for the work...
Article written by Valibri en Roulotte
Illustration: Auguste Renoir, The Boat, circa 1878 Oil on canvas, 54.5 x 65.5 cm Museum Langmatt, Baden Photo © Peter Schälchli, Zürich