Home Emil Bührle's Collection The Collector The Works The Museum Shop Contact Search Sitemap Links Deutsch Français Emil Georg Bührle (Pforzheim, Germany, 1890 - 1956, Zurich, Switzerland) Emil Bührle studies art history in Freiburg and Munich and, in 1913, visits the newly arranged National Gallery in Berlin, where the French Impressionists are accorded a prominent position. In 1924, Bührle is transferred from Magdeburg to Zurich by his employer to reorganise the ailing Swiss Machine Tool Factory Oerlikon. He assumes sole ownership of the company in 1936, and obtains Swiss citizenship; at the same time he begins with his first purchases of pictures through Swiss dealers. The acquisition of Cézanne's "Boy in the Red Waistcoat", in 1948, and of Renoir's "Little Irene", in 1949, are proof of an increasingly selective procedure which focuses Bührle's attention on masterpieces of modern artists. Bührle acquires about three quarters of his collection between 1951 and 1956 from leading art dealers in New York, London, Paris and Zurich. He also donates a new exhibition wing to the Zurich Kunsthaus (built in 1954-1958), in the interest of which he shelves plans for a gallery of his own. In 1960, Emil Bührle's family establish the Foundation E.G. Bührle Collection and transfer a major share of the collection to it.