We recently returned from a two-week visit to Switzerland, where we visited more than fifty museums and historic sites across the German-, French-, and Italian-speaking regions. Among the many differences in museum practice, one pattern was especially noticeable in the art museums of the German-speaking cantons: their organization around named private collections, or Sammlungen.

A wealthy collector may have assembled works of art over a lifetime and later donated or loaned the collection to a museum. Rather than fully integrating those works into a chronological, thematic, or art-historical presentation, the museum often retains the collection as a distinct unit bearing the donor’s name.

There are legitimate reasons for doing this. A named collection preserves its provenance and recognizes the role of private collecting in the formation of public museums. It can reveal an individual collector’s tastes, preferences, ambitions, and blind spots. The collection itself can become a historical document.

This model is not unique to Switzerland. American museums such as the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and the Frick Collection in New York preserve, to varying degrees, the identity and vision of their founders’ private collections. In those institutions, however, the collector’s personality, residence, installation choices, or philosophy of looking is central to the museum’s public identity. Visitors generally understand that they are entering a particular person’s conception of art.

The situation becomes more complicated when several named collections coexist within a larger institution. The visitor is no longer encountering one clearly defined collector’s museum but moving among several private visions whose differences are not always explained.

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