By Bob Evans

Winterthur street pianist (photo: Bob Evans)

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Winterthur? Isn’t that where the insurance people come from? They have a nice art gallery, don’t they?

I heard it was just a suburb of Zurich. You go through it on the train to St Gallen.

It’s where Swiss heavy industry got started. It must be pretty grim. Don’t they still build railway engines up there?

Well, partly yes, but also no. This city of just over 100,000 people, the sixth largest in Switzerland, is much more than the sum of those parts.

Flea markets and jazz pianists

Street jazz pianist, child, in Winterthur (photo, Bob Evans)

Its traffic-free old town, with many of its four-storey terraced dwellings and stately mansions dating back to the 16th centur, is reputed to be the largest in Switzerland. At the weekend, jazz bands and folk musicians perform the length of the cobbled Marktgasse, the wide shopping street that bisects the area. On one sunny autumn Saturday recently they gave way to a bearded concert pianist in black frock coat and tails alternately tickling and pounding the keys of a Steinway Grand in an eclectic selection of classical pieces and modern hits.

Further down, just across from the railway station where Marktgasse becomes Untertor in memory of the town gate torn down in the 19th century after local shopkeepers complained they could not get their goods carts through, is a regular open-air market of produce from the countryside around, including the fruity, full-bodied red wine of the region.

And just a block away on Neumarkt square and in the streets around, once a month locals flock to a rambling Saturday flea market where ancient-looking farm implements and rusting iron locks jostle with possibly antique crockery and the comic books and gramophone records of an earlier generation.

Marking the edge of the Old Town to the north is Stadthausstrasse, named for the Greek-columned 19th century former town hall, of which local people – strangely to an outsider – seem inordinately proud. On the southern side of the street, reached from the interior of the Old Town on its central stretch by narrow passageways through medieval, inward-looking courtyards, many houses are windowless, witnesses to their original purpose as part of a defensive wall against potential invaders.

Not so hidden treasures: Winterthur’s art bonanza

Oskar Reinhart

But the street’s main attraction, although from outside there is little to indicate the treasures within, is a former boys’ school, grey and featureless apart from its porticoed entrance topped by four undistinguished statues.

Inside, beautifully displayed since a renovation in 2009-10, are some of the finest works of Swiss, German and Austrian art of the 18th to early 20th centuries amassed by Oskar Reinhart, scion of a city merchant dynasty which made its wealth from trading cotton and cloth between Europe and India in the 19th century and, like other families that benefited from the economic prosperity and the industrial boom of 150 years ago, turned some of their riches to bringing art to the public.

Today, the Reinhart name is firmly linked to Winterthur through the museum on Stadthaussegasse and the 200-painting collection in his former home, Am Romerholz. It sits high on a steep wooded hill to the west of the city, where the art is shown according to the collector’s idiosyncratic but effective concept of how art of different periods and styles should be displayed. Some of the best-known works of Edouard Manet, Paul Cezanne, Auguste Renoir and Vincent van Gogh hang alongside gems by key artists of Europe’s later Middle Ages and 17th and 18th centuries like Lukas Cranach, Hans Holbein, Nicolas Poussin and Francisco Goya.

Reinhart left the house and its surrounding gardens together with the collection to the city on his death in 1965. He had donated the nearly 600 works to the city for display in the downtown museum in the late 1930s, but the building only opened in 1950. They range from German Romantic classics like Caspar David Friedrich and Georg Friedrich Kersting to Swiss masters Albert Anker and Ferdinand Hodler who span two centuries of northern European art up to 1919.

Referring to his entire collection, some 800 paintings and several thousand drawings amassed from the early 1900s when he was a young and handsome salesman for his father’s firm, Reinhart set out his philosophy as a collector not long before his death. “Even though such works may legally have only one owner, in a higher sense they belong to the general public and the owner should consider himself merely the trustee.”

Winterthur’s city Art Museum itself has works donated by Reinhart, who was something of a conservative and had little time for anything after the post-Impressionists. But its prime claim to fame is a collection of modern art from Paul Klee, Rene Magritte and Piet Mondrian to Cubists like Georges Braque and Fernand Leger.

And then in the Villa Flora across town there are the Nabis, Pierre Bonnard, Felix Valloton and Edouard Vuillard, while the Swiss Photography Museum which offers a stunning display of camera art stretching back almost to its origins.

All of these can be reached from the railway station by a mini-bus which shuttles between them at hourly intervals throughout the day from the railway station at an on-off fare of CHF5.

The food

Winterthur’s open air markets (photo, Bob Evans)

Winterthur is not short of good places to eat, from Molino, an Italian art-nouveau style brasserie on Marktgasse to the Casinotheater Restaurant where the theatre crowd gather on the corner of Stadthaussstrasse and the Old Town’s Graben, and then – this a taxi ride – the up-market but family-run Goldenburg with a spectacular view over the city back up the hill past Reinhart’s Am Romerholz.

Back to the industry

The industry? It is still there, but now in a high-tech form in the suburb of Ober-Winterthur. Its original home on what was then the wrong side of the railway tracks in the Sulzer Real district, named after the now international engineering and manufacturing conglomerate which set up there in a tiny workshop the 1830s, is a new town in progress.

The cavernous sheds and factory workshops have given way over the past decade to apartment blocks and offices, schools and shopping centres often fitted into the shells of the old buildings. A row of old Sulzer workers’ houses now provide accommodation for students of the technical college and the college has installed a three-storey construction providing design studios inside one of the old railway sheds. And yes, all this is part of a city tour.

Goodbye insurance, hello direct trains

Insurance? Well, the Winterthur company set up in 1875 still has offices in the town, but since its 2007 merger with the French AXA group its headquarters have switched to Paris.

And if you take the direct train back to Bern or Geneva, you don’t even have to get off in Zurich.