Oskar Reinhart

A prominent pre-World War II art patron and collector, Oskar Reinhart assembled an expansive collection of European art from the fourteenth to the early-twentieth centuries. His diverse holdings included significant works of French modern art, particularly examples of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

Born into a wealthy family of merchants, Reinhart inherited a love for art and collecting from his father, Theodor, and brother, Georg. Theodor’s firm, Volkart Brothers, was a major European import company, which conducted direct trade between South Asia and continental Europe. In addition to his commercial activities, Theodor collected art and financially supported young Swiss and German artists and architects, such as Hermann Haller, Ferdinand Hodler, and Karl Hofer. Reinhart’s brother, Georg, was also a patron of modern art, investing in the work of contemporary artists such as Hermann Hesse, Hermann Hubacher, Karl Geiser, Giovanni Mardersteig, and Frans Masereel. Additionally, Georg amassed works of East Asian art, French Impressionism, and German Expressionism.

Oskar Reinhart began building his own collections in the 1910s. Joining the family business at the age of eighteen, he began to travel widely in Europe and to visit important museums and private collections. In Berlin, Reinhart became acquainted with the collection of French Impressionism assembled byHugo von Tschudi, the director of the National Gallery of Berlin. The work 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—deeply informed his collecting practices. In 1924, Reinhart withdrew from the family firm to devote himself entirely to expanding his collection. 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 master and Northern Renaissance painters, such as Matthias Grünewald, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Holbein the Younger, and Pieter Bruegel, his tastes leaned toward French modern art.

Deeply impressed by the works of Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh, Reinhart acquired paintings by these artists and many other Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, including Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Edgar Degas, Edouard Manet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley, and Edouard Vuillard. His collection also included four works by Pablo Picasso: an early painting, Portrait de Mateu F. de Soto (1901); and three pencil drawings, La Siesta (1919), Mère allaitant son Enfant (1919), and Le Repos des Moissonneurs (1919), all now held by the Sammlung Oskar Reinhart Am Römerholz in Winterthur, Switzerland. Reinhart usually purchased works of art directly from other private collectors, but he occasionally bought from prominent art dealers, such as Paul Cassirer, Alfred Flechtheim, and Fritz Nathan, or through the dealer-painter Carl Montag.

In 1940 Reinhart donated a portion of his holdings, consisting of about six hundred works by Austrian, German, and Swiss artists, to the town of Winterthur. Since 1951, this part of his collection has been housed in what is now known as the Kunstmuseum Winterthur | Reinhart am Stadtgarten. In 1958, Reinhart bequeathed the remainder of his collection (approximately two hundred works by old masters and nineteenth-century French paintings) as well as his private residence, Am Römerholz, to the Swiss government. After his death in 1965, the villa was converted into a museum and opened to the public five years later.