Thunensia – Views and Stories of a Town – Research at Thun Castle

Few Swiss towns have been drawn, engraved, painted and photographed as often as Thun. As early as the 18th century, the Swiss «Kleinmeister» sold their vedute of town, lake and Alps to the first Alpine travellers; in the 19th century, the town at the gateway to the Bernese Oberland became a motif for a worldwide public – up to the colourful photochrom prints and picture postcards of the Belle Époque.

Among the more than 17,000 objects in its collection, the Thun Castle Foundation preserves a rich holding of such Thunensia: vedute and prints, paintings, photographs, postcards, maps, posters and memorabilia. One of its treasures is the daguerreotype of Thun Castle taken by Franziska Möllinger in 1844 – one of only two surviving originals by Switzerland’s first woman photographer. And the earliest known photograph of the town, a daguerreotype by Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey from 1840, is kept today at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles: Thun has been a motif from the very first hour of photography.

Much of this material has barely been studied. With the research project «Thunensia» we are opening up these holdings: we inventory, date and attribute the works, trace their provenance – and tell the stories they hold. In doing so, we connect our collection with the archives, libraries and digital platforms where Thun’s pictorial memory is accessible today.

The tourist town of the 19th century

With the first steamboat on Lake Thun (1835), the railway from Bern (1859) and grand hotels such as the Thunerhof, Thun became the hub of tourism in the Bernese Oberland. Panoramas and souvenirs, hotel brochures, posters and postcards were produced for the guests in vast numbers – images that shape how the world sees Thun to this day. Our Thunensia document this era of hospitality more densely than almost any other source.

The military town

In 1819 the Federal Military School began operating on the Thun Allmend – and Thun remains Switzerland’s largest military training ground to this day. Its most famous graduate: Louis Napoleon, the future Emperor Napoleon III, who trained in Thun from 1830, became a captain of the Bernese artillery in 1834 and lodged at the «Freienhof». Pictures of uniforms and barracks, photographs of manoeuvres and memorabilia tell this chapter of the town’s history.

Famous guests

Johann Wolfgang Goethe stopped in Thun in 1779 on his second journey through Switzerland; Heinrich von Kleist lived for several months in 1802 on an island in the River Aare just outside the town – today’s Kleist-Inseli. Johannes Brahms spent three summers (1886–1888) in the Hofstetten quarter and composed his Double Concerto here, among other works; the Brahmsquai remembers him. And Ferdinand Hodler learned his craft from the Thun vedute painter Ferdinand Sommer. The famous guests have left their traces in the townscape – and in the pictures and memorabilia of our collection.

Discover the Thunensia online

Thun’s pictorial memory is spread across many collections today – much of it freely accessible online:

• thunensis.com – Thun historisch – the virtual archive of Thun’s history (in German): thousands of pictures and documents in more than 70 thematic chapters, from railway stations and hotels to the military, told with wit and verve. Many Thunensia can be encountered there digitally, embedded in their stories – along with a useful collection of links.
• Wocher panorama interactive – explore the Thun panorama of 1814 on screen in high resolution, figure by figure.
• Burgerbibliothek Bern – more than 1,400 historical views of Thun in the online catalogue – and the photographic collection of the Krebser family, the treasure of the Thun publishing house, digitised by Memoriav.
• Image archive of the ETH Library – more than half a million historical photographs, including numerous views of Thun.
• Photochrom collection of the Library of Congress – the colour photochrom views of Thun around 1900, high-resolution and free to use.
• J. Paul Getty Museum – the daguerreotypes of photography pioneer Girault de Prangey, including the earliest known photograph of Thun (1840).
• KIMnet and the mmBE collection catalogue – objects from our collection in the catalogues of the Swiss and Bernese museums.

Archives and sources

• Stadtarchiv Thun – the town archives, the memory of the town, with an online finding aid to its holdings.
• e-newspaperarchives.ch – the «Thuner Wochenblatt» (from 1838) and the «Thuner Tagblatt» digitised: the newspapers behind our pictures.
• Thuner Stadtgeschichte 1798–2018 – «the unique book online» (in German): the town’s recent history in text and pictures.
• DigiBern – digitised Bernensia on Thun, including the old address books of the town.
• Time travel with swisstopo – Thun on the map since 1864 – and thunintime.ch – Thun then and now in photographic comparison.

Further reading

• Markus Krebser: Mein liebes Thun – ein Rundgang vor 150 Jahren, Thun 2025 (in German) – 370 mostly unpublished photographs from the Belle Époque; the expanded new edition of the 1980 classic, published by Verlag Krebser.
• Thun-Thunersee Tourismus – Ein Jahrhundert Gastfreundschaft, Thun/Gwatt 2026 (in German) – the centenary volume on 100 years of organised hospitality on Lake Thun: pioneers, milestones and a look ahead.
• Karl Friedrich Ludwig Lohners Chronik der Stadt Thun, ed. Gertrud Züricher (in German) – the classic 19th-century town chronicle, digitised on e-rara.
• And of course our own annual reports since 1923 (in German) – with numerous contributions on the collection and the town’s history.

A special place: the Thun Panorama

One of the most magnificent Thunensia of all is a work that lives not with us but just around the corner: the Thun panorama by Marquard Wocher (1760–1830). From 1809 the Basel «Kleinmeister» sketched the town all around from a rooftop on Kreuzgasse and then painted the monumental circular picture in Basel: some 7.5 by 38 metres of canvas, a Sunday view across lanes, rooftops, lake and Alps, enlivened by several hundred figures – the oldest surviving circular panorama in the world.

The panorama, which opened in Basel in 1814, was not a commercial success: after Wocher’s death it changed hands several times, was put into storage and almost forgotten – until it was rediscovered in the 1950s and returned to Thun. Since 1961 it has stood in its own rotunda in Schadau Park; it was comprehensively restored in 2014, belongs to the Gottfried Keller Foundation and is looked after by Kunstmuseum Thun. A visit to the Thun Panorama belongs to every Thunensia itinerary – and if you cannot wait, explore it interactively on screen.

Are you researching Thun’s pictorial history yourself, or do you look after a collection or archive? We look forward to hearing from you: info@schlossthun.ch.

Experience the objects yourself

In the permanent exhibition in the keep, selected objects tell the story of the town and the region – from vedute to memorabilia. Find out more about the collection and its more than 17,000 objects on our collection page.