Bought while contemporary
Renoir, Cézanne and Monet when they were still contested, not classics.
Fanimu — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Harubaba — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Harubaba — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Harubaba — CC BY-SA 3.0
An early twentieth-century villa in the Swiss town of Baden, showing a private French Impressionist collection in the house it was assembled for. The Swiss industrialist Sidney Brown and his wife Jenny built it in 1900 and over decades gathered works by Renoir, Cézanne, Monet, Degas, Pissarro and Gauguin — at a time when these were still contemporary and contested painters rather than safe classics. What makes the visit different is that the paintings still hang in living rooms among the original furniture, not in white museum galleries. You see them as the people who bought them saw them: above a fireplace, between windows, in a dining room. The house became a museum in 1990 under the family's bequest. A point that needs stating: the museum faced a severe financial crisis in recent years and had to sell some of its paintings to fund restoration of the building — a decision that caused wide debate in Switzerland. Check what is on display before going. Swiss Baden is about half an hour from Zurich, and is not in Germany.
Renoir, Cézanne and Monet when they were still contested, not classics.
You see the paintings as their owners saw them at home.
Selling paintings to fund the building's restoration divided opinion in Switzerland.
Baden, canton Aargau, Switzerland
Because the building needed fundamental restoration and the foundation lacked the resources, so it decided to auction several Cézanne works in 2023 to fund the work and secure the museum's future. Many in the Swiss art world opposed the decision as a dangerous precedent — a public institution selling from its collection to cover operating costs. Others supported it, arguing the alternative was closing the museum entirely.
Not practically. The distance is about a hundred and eighty kilometres across a border, a long journey for a small museum. It is better visited from Zurich — about half an hour by train — if you are in Switzerland. The similarity of the names creates genuine confusion, so take care when planning.
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