From Arcadia to Atlanta

The Swiss artist Frank Buchser gained renown as a world traveller with a taste for adventure and his paintings and sketches are an impressive testimony of the great range of the his interests. However the fact that Buchser was a keen collector of photographs during his travels abroad is less well-known. In 1896, the collection of the Kupferstichkabinett of Kunstmuseum Basel received around 200 of these photographs. The significance of these photographs is not limited to their influence on the work of the artist: they include major works of early photography, ranging from views of the Romana Campagna to photographs of the American Civil War to impressions of the English coast. This valuable collection, on view to the public for the first time, will be presented as part of a dialogue with the works of Buchser himself.