To the Sun! To Freedom!

The 2026 summer exhibition at the Reinhart am Stadtgarten is dedicated to one instance of the birth of modern painting: the beginning of plein-air painting in oil at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The presentation To the Sun! To Freedom! traces the various developments of painting outdoors in nature. It aims to imagine the heyday of making oil studies in Italy and to relate, for the first time, the story of the specific Swiss version of the genre.

The exhibition contains masterpieces by all of the significant painters in this field, including founder Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes and Simon Denis; early German proponents such as Martin von Rohden and Johann Georg von Dillis; and master drawings by Heinrich Reinhold, Ernst Fries and Achille Etna Michallon. The show culminates in enchanting works by Carl Blechen and Camille Corot, spanning the development from discovering the light of Italy to liberating the genre. In addition, the exhibition traces the development in Switzerland, where—as is little known—the oil study was used starting in the late eighteenth century by artists such as Caspar Wolf, the Swiss pioneer of Alpine painting.

Collecting refined oil studies was one of Oskar Reinhart’s greatest passions. This is why the collection contains a great number of excellent landscape studies in oil on paper that reflect both the liberation of Swiss painting and the supreme development of the genre in Italy. The exhibition also contains many studies from museums and private collections in France, Germany, and Switzerland. 

With its focus on superb quality and the new aspect of Swiss painting, this exhibition differs fundamentally from the recent exhibitions of oil studies shown with great acclaim in Paris, Cambridge, and Washington. Moreover, with over thirty unpublished works, the exhibition is certain to surprise experts.

The exhibition is cocurated by David Schmidhauser and German bestselling author Florian Illies, an expert of German and French painting of the early nineteenth century.

Curated by David Schmidhauser and Florian Illies