Agenda

Einsiedeln Abbey is one of the most significant European places of pilgrimage, drawing people from all over the world. Popes, emperors, kings and ordinary citizens have lavished privileges, gifts and donations on this abbey with its vast European network. More than 250 000 pilgrims visited the abbey in 1720 for example. Thanks to the aura of this pilgrimage destination, the abbey survived the Reformation and the consequences of the French Revolution. The exhibition tells the eventful history of the abbey and of its pilgrimage. Many of the main exhibits are on show outside the abbey walls for the very first time. Examples include a manuscript said to have belonged to Saint Meinrad, a chalice from King Carol of Romania and the splendid clothes and jewellery of the Black Madonna.Madonna.

19th-century French painting offers artists who enjoyed great recognition and the plaudits of art critics and audiences, but are little known in German-speaking countries. Although indebted to traditional painting techniques and themes, they were in some cases highly innovative. French painting at this time is mainly famous for Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, ‘plein air’ painting, Impressionism and their famous artists, such as Géricault, Delacroix, Corot, Daumier, Millet, Courbet, Manet, Sisley, Monet and Renoir (and many others). They were highly controversial in their day however, but famous nowadays. The more traditional painters, such as Delaroche, Couture, Meissonier, Cabanel, Gérôme und Bouguereau, were highly celebrated artists in the nineteenth century, sidelined today. The exhibition brings together these various and hotly debated approaches in nineteenth century French painting to create a rich and diverse panorama of the era’s genres.

The fourth and final exhibition in the 150-year jubilee series of the Collection of Graphic Art (Graphische Sammlung) takes visitors back in time through the history of draughtsmanship. Prints from four centuries shed new light on the development of aesthetic perceptions from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. They bear witness to the many different ways in which drawing skills have been developed by institutions as part and parcel of training, and illustrate the respective educational approaches involved.