A museum built on village views

What makes Gais's museum unusual is the narrowness of its obsession. Rather than a general history museum, it preserves a graphic collection begun in 1972 for the village's 700-year anniversary, then steadily expanded with purchases, bequests and gifts of depictions of "Old Gais." By the early 1990s it already held more than 160 exhibits, joined by antique furniture, chronicles and objects tied to local history. After years of being hung in council rooms and finally packed away, the views found a proper home in the townhouse at the Dorfplatz, growing across two floors and relaunching in June 2021 as a fully redesigned museum run by the Verein Museum Gais.↗

The reason so many pictures of this one village exist is the whey-cure craze (Molkenkur) of the 18th and 19th centuries. Between about 1749 and the century's end Gais was a fashionable spa retreat, and travelling artists—many of them "Kleinmeister," or small-format masters—came to capture the town and its surroundings, cutting them into copper, steel and wood engravings or painting aquatints to sell to guests as souvenirs. These images travelled across Switzerland and far beyond, which is why a wide variety of Gais views still circulates today.↗↗

The Fitzi panoramas and the upstairs exhibition

The pride of the collection is the work of Appenzell artist Johann Ulrich Fitzi (1798–1855), who recorded places across the region in remarkably faithful pen-and-ink drawings. Between 1840 and 1842 he produced a sequence of seven sub-views of Gais and its surroundings for the innkeeper Salomon Heim; these panoramas fill a whole wall and anchor the upstairs permanent display, alongside individual drawings of single houses in the village.↗↗

The exhibition is laid out as a slow reveal: after the panoramas come views of the village seen from its outskirts, then images of the historic core, including several works by the painter Bruno Kirchgraber (1900–1983). It is designed for active discovery—pull-out wall panels and shallow drawers hide additional prints, and two screens let you zoom in on details and browse works not currently hung. The final room, a deliberate "Sammelsurium," gathers objects from local history: schoolchildren's calligraphy exercise booklets (Osterschriften), reliefs, a wooden wheel clock, a halberd linked to the Battle of the Stoss, old maps, and the imposing old village cash chest with its heavy locking mechanism. Among them stands a walnut corner buffet from the former Restaurant Rähn, complete with a built-in wash-cabinet and a hidden side door.↗

The visit begins in the upstairs Trauzimmer, or wedding room, an open space around a large table hung with portraits of Gais's Landammänner (chief magistrates). There the legendary "Schottensepp"—Anton Josef Inauen (1725–1791), said to have carried fresh whey from the Oberer Mesmer down to Gais in the early morning hours—takes his place among the dignified faces, and one wall is given over to a graphic retelling of the village's history.↗

Rotating shows and the house itself

The ground floor hosts roughly two temporary exhibitions a year, and since 2023 the guiding rule is that they must connect closely to Gais. Recent projects have paired the painter-father-and-son duo Carl August and Carl Walter Liner, whose landscapes define the Appenzell image; shown turn-of-the-century work by Sigismund Righini and Augusto Giacometti; and collaborated with the Klang Moor Schopfe audiovisual festival set in the local high moor. A 2024 joint show across Appenzell Ausserrhoden museums took on the theme of tourism itself.↗

The setting is part of the experience. The "Haus zur Blume" was rebuilt after Gais's village fire of 1781—a six-storey mansard-gabled timber house whose windows and rooflines blend into the harmonious mix of classical hipped-roof and vernacular wooden gable houses that ring the Dorfplatz. From its southern windows the view opens onto the Alpstein range, while the reception-area carpet is itself a map of the village: old houses shown filled in, medium-aged ones hatched, and newer buildings only in outline. The 2021 redesign gave the museum a quiet palette—a red counter and stair rail, a green carpet and dark-blue upstairs walls that flatter the delicate prints.↗

Planning your visit

The museum is open Sunday afternoons from 14:00 to 17:00, with other visiting times available by arrangement; around the Christmas period it has been open daily in the afternoons. Admission is free, and guided tours for groups can be arranged on request, including in combination with a walk through the village itself. The house sits directly on the Dorfplatz, so the visit pairs naturally with a stroll around the square and the surrounding Appenzell landscape. It is considered good for children.↗↗↗