A Swiss collector’s impressive trove of Asian art
Housed in an elegant, late-19th-century townhouse in Geneva, the collections of the Baur Foundation, Museum of Far Eastern Art contain more than 9,000 Chinese and Japanese works amassed by Swiss collector Alfred Baur. These treasures, acquired over a period of some 45 years during Baur’s early 20th-century travels across Asia, include Chinese imperial ceramics, jades and snuff bottles from the 10th to the 19th centuries, as well as Japanese prints, lacquer, netsuke and sword fittings. The museum holds the largest collection of Far Eastern art available to the public in Switzerland, and features a tranquil Japanese garden made in the karesansui or dry garden style, composed of 20 stones and raked gravel which is visible from various locations inside the museum. A renovation to the second-floor Japanese rooms between 2008 and 2010 added new, larger gallery space, a special cabinet for Japanese prints and a tatami-mat–covered room inspired by traditional tea houses.
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