Coray, Han (1880-1974)
Titles
Mr.
Description
From 1916 to 1917, Han Coray owned the Galerie Coray in Zurich and Basel. He exhibited avant-garde and Dada works of art. He was also a school director until 1917. After 1917, he worked as a book and art dealer in Zurich until 1919. From 1920 to 1928, he amassed an immense art collection which he had to liquidate after his second wife’s death. In the meantime, he built a private museum for... Read more
From 1916 to 1917, Han Coray owned the Galerie Coray in Zurich and Basel. He exhibited avant-garde and Dada works of art. He was also a school director until 1917. After 1917, he worked as a book and art dealer in Zurich until 1919.
From 1920 to 1928, he amassed an immense art collection which he had to liquidate after his second wife’s death. In the meantime, he built a private museum for European art of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries on his country estate in Erlenbach.
Coray was one of the first Swiss dealers to collect African art. Today, parts of his African collection are in the Ethnological Museum of the University of Zurich and the Museum Rietberg in Zurich.
Han Coray sold Benin objects from various sources, whether acquired from members of the British Military Campaign on Benin (H. H. Rawson) or from other dealers (Heinrich Umlauff, Paul Guillaume, Arthur Max Heinrich Speyer, etc.). These were purchased mostly by Swiss museums (and the Volksbank, Zurich) and are now in the collections of the Völkerkundemuseum der Universität Zürich, the Historisches und Völkerkundemuseum, St. Gallen, and the Museum Rietberg, Zurich.
A large part of his collection (examined and evaluated by Charles Ratton and Ernst Ascher) was sold by the Schweizerische Volksbank (Zurich) to various museums in 1940–41.
Coray’s son (Hans Coray) sold two objects from his father’s collection to Hans W. Kopp in 1985 (now property of the Museum Rietberg, Zurich).
Places of contact
Zurich, CHExternal biography links
Edo designations
English designations
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29 objects
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