50 masterpieces of impressionism make their first trip

They were originally from Winterthur and came from well-to-do families. Sidney Brown (1865-1941), technical director of the company Brown, Boveri et Cie, and Jenny Sulzer (1871-1968), who had trained as a painter in Munich, married in 1896. It was in Paris, during their honeymoon, that they fell in love with French art. They bought two paintings at the Georges Bernheim gallery: a Landscape by Paul-Désiré Trouillebert in the spirit of Camille Corot and the Washers on the banks of the Touques by Eugène Boudin. From there, an exceptional collection of around fifty impressionist works was created and installed within the walls of the Villa Langmatt.

Genesis of a collection

The BBC headquarters, where Sidney Brown worked, was in Baden, hence their choice to settle there. Between 1898 and 1901, the architect Karl Moser built them a custom-made villa, which today houses the Langmatt Museum where their collections are kept, notably the one devoted to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. The institution is currently closed for renovations and around fifty works are on loan for a travelling exhibition. The first stop, in Lausanne, coincides with the 150th anniversary of the birth of Impressionism. “, explains Sylvie Wuhrmann, director of the Hermitage Foundation, which is celebrating its 40th anniversary. After their first Parisian favorites, Sidney and Jenny Brown-Sulzer began their collection with artists from the Munich Secession. They travel to Germany every year and buy 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. They quickly sold almost everything, to devote themselves to French art from 1908. Until 1919, they would acquire around forty paintings by Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Degas, Cézanne, etc. At this time, French painting was very popular in Switzerland. Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser, other collectors from Winterthur, would buy works by Bonnard, Vuillard, Matisse, etc. between 1905 and 1936. The two couples knew each other: Hedy Hahnloser and Jenny Sulzer were distant cousins.

Pissarro and Renoir in majesty

Like the Hahnlosers, the Browns were connected to the painter Carl Montag (1880-1956), also from Winterthur, but living in Paris since 1903. It was through him that they met the dealer Ambroise Vollard and the collector Georges Viau, a fervent defender of the Impressionists, with whom they negotiated several paintings, including three by Camille Pissarro. In 1908, a year after the death of Paul Cezanne, they bought from Vollard Peaches, carafe and character (around 1900).

The Browns were the first Swiss collectors to acquire a work by the master of Aix. The same goes for Paul Gauguin, with the sublime Still life with fruit bowl and lemonspainted in Brittany in 1889. In that same year, 1908, they met Henri Matisse in Paris, in his studio in the former Sacré-Cœur convent, where they met Sergei Shchukin, a Russian collector who, at that time, had already assembled a large body of impressionist paintings and was beginning to take an interest in the modernity of the Fauvist painter. The Browns, for their part, would buy three ink studies of female nudes from Matisse.

Compose sets

Unlike Arthur and Hedy Hahnloser, who became friends with their protégés, Sidney and Jenny Brown had little contact with artists. They preferred to buy in galleries or at public sales. For about ten years, the acquisitions continued, from Ice cubes, twilight effect (1893) from Monet to The Church of Moret, rainy weather, in the morning (1893) by Sisley, passing through the dazzling Nude woman (1885-1886) by Degas, a pastel whose sensuality of the body is matched only by the extreme delicacy of the yellow drapery.

For some painters, such as Pissarro and Renoir, the Browns formed real ensembles. From the former, they bought six works between 1909 and 1916, including a rare still life, painted around 1899 in surprisingly vivid tones. As for the author of the Ball at the Moulin de la Galetteit is represented by twenty-two paintings from all periods, from The Lodge from 1873-1874 to Landscape of the South of France (1900-1902), passing through The Mat (1886-1887) where Renoir freed himself from Impressionism.

Perpetuate the collection

In their villa, Sidney and Jenny Brown live surrounded by their treasures. They think about the hanging, move the paintings around. At that time – more than thirty-five years after the group’s first exhibition – Impressionism was not yet unanimous. Jenny Sulzer-Brown was aware of this. We sit every evening in the studio in front of the Impressionists, because we have not yet dared to take them down, fearing too many questions from our friends and acquaintances. ” she wrote to Carl Montag in 1910.

After the First World War, the BBC company experienced financial difficulties and the Browns were forced to downsize. They bought less. In the 1930s, however, a few Impressionist works were added to their collection, including three paintings by Cezanne acquired in 1933. Sidney Brown died in 1941, Jenny Sulzer in 1968. The couple left three sons without descendants. The third, John-Alfred, was the most sensitive to the charms of painting.

After the deaths of his brothers in 1970 and 1972, he decided to move into the villa. To perpetuate his parents’ collection, he planned in his will in 1979 to offer the house and its contents to the City of Baden, with the obligation to make them accessible to the public. John-Alfred Brown died in 1987 and the museum, administered by the Langmatt Sidney and Jenny Brown Foundation, opened its doors three years later. Since 2017, a renovation program for the place had been under consideration. All that remained was to find the financing. In 2023, the City of Baden injected ten million Swiss francs into the project, to which was added the equivalent of forty million raised by the sale of three Cezannes at Christie’s in New York on November 9 of the same year. After two years of work, the masterpieces of the Brown-Sulzer collection will return to the walls of the villa in spring 2026.

Museum Langmatt – Das Haus der Entdeckungen