Sinebrychoff Art Museum

The Sinebrychoff Art Museum holds the largest and most valuable collection of old European art in Finland, drawn together from ten founding collections rather than assembled by a single curatorial programme: the Paul and Fanny Sinebrychoff collection at its core, with further paintings from the Klinckowstrom, Linder, Aspelin-Haapkyla, Gohle, Antell and Sihtola donations. Its roughly 6,500 objects run from fourteenth-century Italian panels and Russian and Byzantine icons through Dutch and Flemish seventeenth-century painting to Italian, French and Spanish Old Masters, with about 4,000 prints and drawings and a strong decorative-arts holding in porcelain, silver, glass, clocks and furniture. Its single Rembrandt, its pair of Tiepolos and its two Cranachs give it a depth in pre-1850 European painting that no other Finnish museum attempts to match.

The Sinebrychoff family's wealth, and the house the museum now occupies, both begin with Nikolai Sinebrychoff (1786-1848), a Russian-born businessman who obtained the exclusive right to distil spirits in Helsinki in 1817 and to brew beer in 1819. The brewery he founded that year is still trading today, under Carlsberg Group ownership, as the oldest brewery in the Nordic countries. In 1842 Nikolai completed a grand townhouse at what is now Bulevardi 40: the ground floor held the brewery's offices and servants' quarters, while the family's own apartments on the floor above were fitted with ceiling paintings, stucco work and French wallpaper, and with a bathroom and indoor toilet that were unusually modern conveniences for Helsinki in 1842. Nikolai himself never lived in the house; he preferred his residence on Suomenlinna and left the Bulevardi townhouse to his brother's family.

The nephew who inherited the business and the house began the family's art collection, and it was his wife who kept both the company and the collection going after he died in 1883. Anna Sinebrychoff (1830-1904) became majority shareholder and chair of the board of the brewery on her husband's death, ran the business for two decades, and lived in the Bulevardi house for more than fifty years, active in Helsinki's civic and charitable life throughout. Her son, Paul Sinebrychoff (1859-1917), married the actress Fanny Grahn in 1883, the same year his father died, and became head of the company himself in 1904. Over the following years Paul and Fanny built the family's private holdings into a serious collection of European art: by the time of their donation it comprised roughly 900 objects, including about 100 Old Master paintings and about 350 portrait miniatures, together with antique furniture, silverware and porcelain. In 1921 they bequeathed the entire collection, and the house that held it, to the Finnish state. The museum describes it as the largest single art donation ever made in Finland. The house opened as a museum the same year, on 27 November 1921, with its front rooms kept exactly as Fanny had left them.

The Sinebrychoff Art Museum holds the largest and most valuable collection of old European art in Finland, roughly 6,500 objects in all, drawn from the fourteenth century to the 1850s. Its best-known single work is Rembrandt's Monk Reading, the only painting by Rembrandt anywhere in Finland, shown alongside two panels by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a pair of history paintings by the Venetian father and son Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, and paintings by Jusepe de Ribera and Jacopo Bassano. Beyond the paintings, the museum's holdings run to around 4,000 prints and drawings and a substantial body of decorative art: porcelain, silver, glass, clocks and antique furniture, much of it still standing in the rooms the Sinebrychoffs furnished with it. The second floor keeps that domestic arrangement intact as a house museum, room by room, rather than redisplaying the objects as a gallery hang: an Empire hall, a Gustavian hall, a dining room, a corner salon and Paul Sinebrychoff's own study, each still furnished as a room rather than labelled as a case of objects.

The museum's history since 1921 has not been continuous. It closed in 1939 at the outbreak of the Second World War, and the building was damaged in the wartime bombing of Helsinki before being leased out for industrial use, housing the Helsinki University of Technology's chemistry laboratory for a period after the war. In 1959 and 1960 the Sinebrychoff company itself funded the restoration of the historic rooms, timed to the brewery's 140th anniversary, and the museum reopened on 22 January 1960. The Finnish state purchased the whole building in 1975, and a further renovation between 1978 and 1980 reopened the picture galleries under state ownership. A more recent, more exacting restoration followed in 2002, when curators used black-and-white photographs taken in 1912 to reconstruct the original arrangement of the rooms; the museum reopened in its present form in February 2003.

The Sinebrychoff Art Museum's parent organisation traces back to the Finnish Art Society, founded in 1846; the origins of the national collection it eventually formed lie in the art collection of Baron Otto Wilhelm Klinckowstrom, bought after his death in 1850 by the future Tsar Alexander II and given to the Society. The Society's own gallery building, the Ateneum, opened in 1887. The Sinebrychoff collection joined this wider institutional family only gradually: after its 1960 reopening it operated under the National Art Museum from 1990, the same year the Museum of Contemporary Art was established as a companion body; Kiasma, that museum's own building, opened in 1998. In 2014 the whole structure was reorganised as the Finnish National Gallery, an independent public foundation running the Ateneum Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and the Sinebrychoff Art Museum as its three museum units. Of the three, only the Sinebrychoff specialises in art from before 1850: the Ateneum covers Finnish and international art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Kiasma covers the contemporary. A national collection built around Old Masters, and built entirely from private donations rather than state acquisition, is an unusual profile for a Nordic capital, and the Sinebrychoff is the only museum in Finland that specialises in old European art.

The museum keeps regular weekly hours, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 11:00 to 18:00, Wednesday until 20:00, and weekends from 10:00 to 17:00, closed on Mondays. The second-floor Old Masters collection and the house museum are free to enter at any time; a ticket is needed only for the changing exhibitions on the ground floor and in the cellar. The building has a step-free accessible entrance at the corner facing Sinebrychoff Park, a lift to every exhibition floor, and accepts the EU Disability Card. There is a museum shop on the first floor, but no cafe of its own; the adjoining Southpark restaurant, reached from the same courtyard, serves lunch on weekdays and brunch at weekends.

Visitors consistently single out the second-floor house museum as the reason to come: the sense of walking through the Sinebrychoff family's own rooms, furnished as they lived in them, rather than through a conventional picture gallery. The Old Masters collection is repeatedly described as small enough to see properly in a single visit but strong enough, headed by the Rembrandt and the two Tiepolos, to hold its own against much larger national galleries. Staff are consistently described as helpful, and the museum's central but quiet location on Bulevardi, a short walk from the railway station, is frequently mentioned as a point in its favour.