Founded in adversity

When the museum was founded in 1938, the Schaffhausen Peyer family gave the Museum zu Allerheiligen five portraits of their ancestors as a permanent loan. They comprised a part of the "Peyer family Legate", a family foundation. Tobias Stimmer (1539 –1584) was the painter of four of these portraits. On April 1, 1944, all five of the paintings were completely destroyed.

In the same year, the Peyer family Legate  Board of Management  decided to set up a foundation using the funds from the expected reparations. It was to be named after the famous Schaffhausen artist. In 1946, the United States government paid approximately 350,000 Swiss francs for damage caused by the US 8th Air Force. This sum formed the assets of the Peyer'sche Tobias Stimmer Foundation.

The main concern of the Peyersche Tobias Stimmer Foundation was to preserve Schaffhausen's cultural heritage for the future and to close gaps in the museum's collections. From this time on, the collection policy was to be shaped by three goals: the substitution of the lost works by Stimmer, the bringing together of art objects from the Schaffhausen holdings and the safeguarding of those belonging to the Peyer family.

True to its name, the foundation still focuses on the acquisition of works of art from Tobias Stimmer's time and circle. Since autograph works by the famous Schaffhausen Renaissance painter are only very rarely available on the art market, works by important German predecessors and contemporaries also began to be bought.