Nico Kos Earle visited the Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz” in Winterthur, Switzerland, before the exhibition Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection went on display at London’s The Courtauld Gallery.
The conversation begins over salmon steaks, or rather in front of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, ‘Still Life with Three Salmon Steaks’ (1808–1812), a mouthwatering, provocative work that captures the melting truth of uncooked flesh. “This daub of red paint is like blood running,” says Dr Barnaby Wright, Deputy Head of the Courtauld Gallery, who has accompanied us on this once-in-a-lifetime trip to the Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz” in Winterthur, Switzerland’s low-key cultural capital in the Canton of Zurich (which also boasts the newly renovated Museum Oskar Reinhart at its centre). He is standing to the left of the painting, with the formidable Kerstin Richter, Director of the Oskar Reinhart Collection, on the right, but the painting has all our attention. Goya’s brushwork captures the silky texture, natural variations and tonal shifts in each slice of salmon; livid pinks enrobed in pearlescent skin loom out of the darkness. It activates your saliva glands, almost shockingly, as if Goya is trying to isolate something essential about our appetites.
To some, this painting has the character of a manifesto; the salmon, “liberated from its context and lent heroic status,” is utterly magnificent. To a modern convenience store/ sushi belt audience, its power lies in simplicity, for how it captures a kind of forgotten reverence for the source: a living thing caught, cut and served up. A showcase of Goya’s mastery of colour and form, this fleshy painting carries the hallmarks of his broader oeuvre, which often engaged with themes of mortality and the passage of time. This subject – a fish that leaps effortlessly, swims in both ocean waters and rivers, and was once considered the holder of all mysterious knowledge by the Celts – is the perfect entrée to a cross-cultural, co-institutional show. The exhibition Goya to Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Oskar Reinhart Collection will open with this and a selection of major paintings by artists who preceded the Impressionists: Géricault’s moving A Man Suffering from Delusions of Military Rank (c.1819-22) and Courbet’s provocative The Hammock (1844).
“In our selection, we wanted to do justice to Reinhart’s collection but also set up some interesting aesthetic and thematic connections with the works held at the Courtauld”, explains Dr Wright. At first, one might think this work is by Manet, of how flagrant and viscous the flesh appears, looming out of a darkling ground. “Indeed,” he continues, “the work does resonate with Manet not in the least for his love of Spanish art and culture.” Moreover, it signposts the importance of Still Life, a genre of radical importance to the Post Impressionists – think Cezanne’s apples, or ‘Still Life with a Plate of Peaches’ , which we have just walked past. We are standing in the collector’s former home, carefully curated with his most delicious bijou works.
“One expects the Still Life to depict objects as they are, as they exist, the materialisation of something,” says Richter. “This work shows the dematerialisation of something; it has been a salmon, but now it is slices of flesh (which will be cooked).” It is also emblematic of Reinhart’s great appetite for acquiring and a reminder that every collection is defined by peculiar, deeply personal, and often inexplicable tastes cultivated over a lifetime (both Reinhart and Courtauld were contemporaries). It is an unforgettable image; one I am seeing for the first time because since its purchase, it has never left this building. Only because the Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz” is closing for renovations can this and a selection of key masterpieces travel to London, for when Reinhart bequeathed the entirety of his collection to the Swiss Confederation, Federal Office of Culture (Bundesamt für Kultur, Bern), he stipulated the works must always remain together.
The villa we are standing in, built in 1915 by Maurice Turrettini, might not be as capital as Somerset House, yet it holds a powerful allure to the art-loving pilgrim collector, on par with Fondation Maeght in the South of France. Overlooking a magnificently landscaped garden (where you can picnic in the summer), it boasts its own gallery, which the collector built to house all his works. It sits on a hill above Winterthur, boasting several important museums that connect fundamentally to this. Born into a family of collectors in 1915, Theodore Reinhart, Oskar’s father, funded an entire wing of Winterthur’s new art museum and bequeathed his entire collection to be displayed there. Oskar Reinhart, who in his own lifetime donated a further 600 works to these, later noted that ‘to be able to grow up among artists and to be educated by them to look – that was the great stroke of luck of my youth.’
Art history could be viewed as an evolving conversation (explicit or implied) between artist and their works, and this is also true for collectors. Reinhart began building his own collection in the 1910s after travelling throughout Europe, visiting museums and private collections. In Berlin, Reinhart was introduced to a collection of French Impressionism assembled by Hugo von Tschudi, the director of the National Gallery of Berlin. The works were displayed there along with the monumental three-volume book Entwickelungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst: Vergleichende Betrachtung der bildenden Künste, als Beitrag zu einer neuen Aesthetik (Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics; 1904), written by the German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe. This book would prove seminal in shaping his collection; in 1924, Reinhart withdrew from the family firm to devote himself fully to its expansion. By the early 1930s, he had assembled the majority of his holdings: a group of about 125 paintings, several dozen drawings, and a few sculptures. Although he amassed a well-regarded collection of works by Old Masters and Northern Renaissance painters, including the transcendent ‘Adoration of the Magi in the Snow’ (1563), Pieter Breughel the Elder, his tastes leaned toward French modern art.
Reinhart’s taste for a certain type of painterly expression led the conversation between works in his collection. Unlike his father, who enjoyed relationships with living artists, this fourth son was interested in the painting (almost exclusively purchased on the secondary market), not the artist. He favoured a distinct painterly lexicon – the innovative use of colour and light – and considered Impressionism the most important artistic achievement of all time. This determined his perspective on Old Master pictures: rather than seeing them as manifestations of their time, his acquisition strategy was to highlight them as precursors of modern art and illustrations of a historical development that culminated in Impressionism.
“In seeking out correspondences between historical and modern art, he made Impressionism the lodestar of all painting,” says Dr Wright. “His wide-ranging collection that includes various styles can be viewed as an attempt to reveal what he considered the quintessence of art.” This is evidenced in the careful arrangement of works in his picture gallery, hung thematically. Connected to the villa by a lucent marble hallway, his once private museum is a showcase of the correspondences of form and colour across time. This spectacular mise en scène – now more common in major institutions – allows the viewer to experience painting in purely aesthetic terms whilst reinforcing the collector’s aesthetic. Of course, what we see not only informs what we appreciate but fundamentally alters our tastes. By extension – teaching institutions such as the Courtauld produce historians with a very specific rapport with the history of art – hence, collaborations like this exhibition can be so rewarding.
In her illuminating essay, ‘The Evolution of a Collector: Oskar Reinhart’s Path to Impressionism’ Katja Baumhoff explains, “Oskar Reinhart and Samuel Courtauld – who met in London in 1932 – both formed the greater part of their collections in the 1920s, and the similarities in their taste is immediately apparent: the centrality of Cezanne, for example; the exceptionally important autobiographical Arles works by Van Gogh; the two celebrated and closely related café-concert scenes by Manet; the parallel works by Toulouse-Lautrec, Daumier and others. Both collectors more or less concluded their chronologies with single 1901 Blue-period paintings by Picasso. But there are differences, too, of taste and formation, with Reinhart perhaps leaning more to the intellectual and artistic world of Berlin, of Hugo von Tschudi and Julius Meier-Graefe, and Courtauld to Paris and the few proponents of modern French art in Britain.”
Importantly, Reinhart continued to refine his two large collections until the end of his life. “Manet’s Au café , for instance,” says Richter, “only found its way to Winterthur in 1953, after having been on his wish list for over thirty years.” Of the many reasons to visit the Courtauld for this collaborative exhibition, including the chance to see La Clownesse Cha-U-Ka-O in Moulin Rouge, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec; Reading Girl, around 1850, by Camille Corot; Au Café, by Édouard Manet, perhaps the most inspiring is how it will activate a very personal conversation with your own favourite works. Not only did both collectors share a common love for Impressionism, each believed passionately in the importance of art for the common good – which is why we are able to fully appreciate these extraordinary masterpieces in the flesh. It is a wonderful exhibition to visit alone or with a friend who will likely contribute a different point of view; the experience is like supper with a lover, enhancing everything you taste. Thank you to Switzerland Tourism for a wonderful preview.
Oskar Reinhart Collection “Am Römerholz” in Winterthur, Switzerland
Goya To Impressionism: Masterpieces From The Oskar Reinhart Collection, 14 February – 26 May 2025, The Courtauld Gallery