The 19-year-old who bought a Van Gogh — and drove her own cabriolet
At 19, Gertrud Müller bought a Van Gogh. At 23, she bought a car.
The Kunstmuseum Basel in Basel, Switzerland, is now telling her story in full. Its exhibition `Van Gogh, Hodler and a Cabriolet: The Collector and Pioneer Gertrud Dübi-Müller' runs from 19 September 2026 to 7 February 2027, and the museum bills it as the first extensive show dedicated to Dübi-Müller, who lived from 1888 to 1980.
The centre of the story is Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Charles-Elzéard Trabuc, painted in September 1889. Müller, born in 1888, bought it in 1908 before her 20th birthday, after seeing her first Van Gogh exhibition in March that year at the Galerien Thannhauser in Munich The Art Newspaper.
She bought the painting from the Galerie Miethke in Vienna. It was dispatched to her on 27 April 1908 and paid for on 30 April 1908. The price was 40,000 Swiss francs, then equivalent to US$7,700.
That purchase might have been enough for one lifetime. Müller kept collecting. She later left, meaning bequeathed in her will, the Van Gogh portrait to the Kunstmuseum Solothurn in Solothurn, which has loaned it to Basel for the exhibition.
What makes this stand out is how early she started, and how visible she was. In the same year she bought the Van Gogh, two Swiss painters, Cuno Amiet and Giovanni Giacometti, each painted her portrait at age 19. Both pictures are part of the Basel display, according to the museum's exhibition booklet Kunstmuseum Basel.
Then came the cabriolet of the title. At 23, Müller became the first woman in Solothurn to own a car, an open-topped Piccard-Pictet known as a Pic-Pic. She was also a photographer, and her own images sit alongside the paintings she owned.
The show is installed in the museum's Neubau, its new building, and was curated by Géraldine Meyer. Alongside the main exhibition, the museum is presenting a related display titled `Friendship, Collecting, Connoisseurship'. Evening programmes tied to the Dübi-Müller show are listed from 6 to 9 p.m. on 21 October, 25 November and 9 December 2026.
