Barbara Basting

Barbara Basting

Barbara Basting worked as a cultural editor and currently heads the visual arts division in the City of Zurich’s Culture Department.

The Swiss teacher of the Impressionists

Barbara Basting 18.02.2025 Swiss painter Charles Gleyre (1806-1874), from Chevilly in the canton of Vaud, was an illustrious figure in the 19th century. Painters such as Albert Anker und Auguste Renoir studied at his Paris studio. Gleyre’s own works fused influences from Romanticism and Impressionism.
Self-portrait of Charles Gleyre, between 1830 and 1834 (detail).

How Swiss period rooms influenced American museums

Barbara Basting 03.01.2025 After it opened in 1898, the Swiss National Museum in Zurich and its period rooms served as an important model for museums in the United States.
The National Museum Zurich – shown here on a postcard – was held up in the United States as a model of how a museum should look.

When King Cotton ruled the world

Barbara Basting 01.10.2024 Cotton was the most important commodity of the 19th century. Yet very few artists took an interest in it. One who did was Edgar Degas. His painting of a cotton office in New Orleans is a truly spectacular work.
An eye for economic themes: painter Edgar Degas photographed in 1895.

A teeming painting between art and science

Barbara Basting 14.05.2024 Children love pictures teeming with animals, even in the 21st century. Roelant Savery was an expert in painting wildlife, and he used his skills to impress the Habsburg emperor over 400 years ago as well as inspiring many of his contemporaries, including Swiss artists.
The Paradise by Roelant Savery (detail). The painting was given by the City of Utrecht to Princess Amalie von Solms as a wedding gift on 21 December 1626.

A goddess with wrinkles

Barbara Basting 29.02.2024 Who paints older women? A look at art history shows that painters have always struggled with the subject matter and that they usually needed a pretext to even depict them at all.
‘The Parca Lachesis’ painted by Pietro Bellotti, circa 1684.

A scene of racy bathing pleasure as a social critique

Barbara Basting 28.12.2023 The Reformation brought stricter social mores to many places in Europe, and artists had to adapt if they didn’t want to lose commissions. But these social mores were not popular with everyone – as revealed by this painting by Hans Bock in Basel’s Kunstmuseum.
At time of painting, a picture for somewhere private: Hans Bock the Elder, ‘The Baths at Leuk’, 1597.

How the linen trade brought wealth to Europe

Barbara Basting 09.10.2023 Linen production and trading was once the livelihood of many people in Europe, especially in eastern Switzerland. A famous landscape painting from the Netherlands in Kunsthaus Zürich tells a tale of global trade routes and mutual dependence.
View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields, by Jacob van Ruisdael, c. 1670/1675.

Inventing the battlefield

Barbara Basting 06.06.2023 Paintings of battles often tell us more about the political backdrop than about military successes or acts of war. What they actually reveal are changing understandings of history.
A bold bird’s eye view: the Battle of Alexanderat Issus, painted by Albrecht Altdorfer, 1529.