(Q125406404)
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Carl Geldner was a successful industrialist who founded the Basel Kohleunion. He passed his love of art and collecting on to his son Max, who as a schoolboy accompanied his father on a journey to Bavaria and Franconia in order to study art. Carl Geldner began assembling a major collection of Dutch seventeenth-century Golden Age paintings from 1910. From 1935 he was advised by Dr Hans Schneider-Christ, the founder and director of the RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History, acquiring major works by Gerard David, Pieter de Hooch, Rembrandt, Barend van Orley and Adriaen Isenbrandt. He also bought important paintings by contemporary Swiss artists such as Ferdinand Hodler and Cuno Amiet. Georg Schmidt described the way the collector carefully separated the works in his house in the Langen Gasse in Basel; in the entrance and main reception rooms hung the contemporary works, in his study the old master collection and then in further rooms the old master paintings he had inherited from his father. Max Geldner, who had no direct heirs, made a bequest of the majority of his collection to the Kunstmuseum in Basel in 1958 and also founded the Max Geldner Foundation, which to this day continues to support the museum. (English)
10 April 2024