February 18, 1896, was the closing day of carnival, and the streets of Paris still rang with the noise of the riotous parade. To mark the occasion, L’Écho de Paris published on page three Théophile-Alexandre…

This portrait was acquired in 1994 to add to the set of seven Giacometti paintings bequeathed to the museum in the late 1930s by the local doctor Henri-Auguste Widmer (1853-1939). The earliest work in the…

Marius Borgeaud spent the months from spring to autumn in the Breton village of Rochefort-en-Terre every year from 1909 to 1919. In 1911 and 1912, he devoted a series of paintings to his friend Ernest…

Around the turn of the twentieth century, Félix Vallotton produced some four hundred portraits of well-known subjects, mostly his contemporaries. The small Indian ink sketches were commissioned by press publications like Le Mercure de France,…

The Book of Genesis recounts how Joseph, son of Jacob and Rachel, was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers. His new owner was the pharaoh’s guard Potiphar, whose wife tried to seduce him.

This large painting depicts the village of Saint-Saphorin, recognisable from the unfinished church steeple. The brown tones of the stepped Lavaux vineyards and the Alpine foothills dusted with snow indicate that winter is on its…

François Bocion trained under Charles Gleyre in Paris, trying his hand at history painting on his return to Lausanne where he worked for the rest of his career. His major works in the genre are…

The painter and copperplate engraver Jakob Lorenz Rüdisühli moved to Basel in 1868. There, he set about popularising drawings by leading Swiss artists in several sets of prints that he later published as Schweizerisches Künstler-Album.

Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours, born in Geneva and trained in Paris, was awarded the Prix de Rome in 1780. However, as a Swiss Protestant, he was not allowed to join the city’s French Academy and spent the…

Gabriel-Constant Vaucher, the son of an enamel painter, studied drawing in Geneva before moving to Rome where he trained with his cousin, the painter Jean-Pierre Saint-Ours. Together, they promoted the neo-classical style in Geneva. Vaucher…