Museum collection Am Römerholz

The Museum Collection Am Römerholz is an art museum in Winterthur, Canton of Zurich, Switzerland, housed in the former residence of collector Oskar Reinhart (1885-1965). The institution holds a superlative collection of European painting from the fourteenth to the early twentieth century, with particular concentration on French Impressionism and its antecedents. As a federal museum under the Swiss Confederation's Federal Office of Culture in Bern, it stands as one of Switzerland's most significant repositories of private collecting turned public heritage. Both the building and collections are inscribed as Swiss cultural property of national importance.

Oskar Reinhart came from a wealthy merchant family; his father Theodor had supported Swiss artists, and his older brother Georg had begun collecting. Reinhart entered the family firm Gebrüder Volkart at age eighteen, using business travels abroad to deepen his artistic knowledge by visiting nearly every major European museum and studying private collections. His eye was trained on quality rather than accumulation of famous names. The 1906 Jahrhundertausstellung deutscher Kunst in Berlin, organized by Hugo von Tschudi, Alfred Lichtwark, and Julius Meier-Graefe, proved decisive for his collecting direction, as did Tschudi's collection of French Impressionists at the National Gallery and Meier-Graefe's 1904 Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modernen Kunst. After his father's death in 1919 and his own retirement from business in 1924, Reinhart systematically expanded his acquisitions. In 1924 he purchased the Villa Am Römerholz, built 1913-1915 by Geneva architect Maurice Turrettini for industrialist Henri Sulzer-Ziegler, and commissioned Turrettini to add a gallery wing. Reinhart acquired works primarily from other private collections, occasionally through dealers such as Paul Cassirer, Alfred Flechtheim, and Fritz Nathan, or via the Paris-based Winterthur painter Carl Montag. In 1951 he donated works of German, Austrian, and Swiss art to the city of Winterthur, now displayed at the Museum Oskar Reinhart in the city center. By testament in 1958, he bequeathed the villa and its European collection to the Swiss Confederation, expressing his conviction that while works might legally belong to an individual, in a higher sense they belonged to the public and the owner served merely as their custodian. Following minor alterations after Reinhart's death in 1965, the museum opened to the public on 7 March 1970 with a ceremony attended by Federal President Hans Peter Tschudi. Under the original deed of gift, works from the Am Römerholz collection could not be lent for decades; since 2018 the Federal Office of Culture has permitted selective loans to other museums. The museum closed on 9 December 2024 for renovation, with reopening planned for early 2026.

The collection comprises approximately 200 works spanning European painting from the fourteenth to the early twentieth century, supplemented by sculpture, drawings, and tapestries. Reinhart's concentration on nineteenth-century French art grew from his particular devotion to Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Édouard Manet, and Paul Cézanne. The holdings encompass immediate precursors of Impressionism, the core Impressionist movement, and select successors, alongside Old Master paintings chosen for their pictorial quality rather than thematic or symbolic interest. Reinhart deliberately juxtaposed works from different periods, believing that art history culminated in Impressionism. He avoided the avant-garde, admitting at most an early Picasso. Since 2005 the museum has organized focused exhibitions every one to two years placing individual collection works in broader art-historical context, beginning with Manet's Au Café and continuing with presentations on Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Delacroix, and Corot.

The museum is located in Winterthur, Canton of Zurich, Switzerland, and belongs to the Swiss Confederation, administered by the Federal Office of Culture in Bern. The official website is www.roemerholz.ch. The museum closed on 9 December 2024 for renovation works, with reopening anticipated for early 2026. During closure, the collection remains inaccessible to the public.