Georg Gsell

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Still life

Georg Gsell (born January 28, 1673 in St. Gallen , † November 22, 1740 in St. Petersburg ) was a Swiss baroque painter , art advisor and art dealer.

Life

He received his training from 1690 to 1695 in Vienna with the painter Antoon Schoonjans (1655-1726). After his training he lived and worked from 1697 to 1704 in his native city of St. Gallen. In 1697 he married Marie Gertrud von Loen from Frankfurt am Main . The couple had five daughters, including Elisabeth Gsell, born in St. Gallen in 1699, who married the bibliographer and translator Isaac Le Long in Amsterdam in 1717 , and Katherina Gsell, born in Amsterdam in 1707, who later became the first wife of the mathematician Leonhard Euler .

In 1704 Gsell moved to Amsterdam. After the death of his first wife (May 13th 1713) he was briefly married to Anna Houtmans (or Horstmans) in 1714/1715. This marriage ended in a separation after about six months . At the end of 1717 he married for the third time, the widow Dorothea Maria Hendriks , b. Graff ( Nuremberg February 2, 1678 to May 5, 1743 St. Petersburg), daughter of the natural scientist and painter Maria Sibylla Merian and the Nuremberg still life and architecture painter Johann Andreas Graff (parents divorced). Graff was also a painter who had traveled with her mother for some time to Suriname , where she had painted the drawings and paintings of the local flora and fauna. Like her mother, she was primarily interested in flowers and insects. Gsell lived in the Kerkstraat even before the marriage, possibly even in the house of Dorothea Maria's mother, who died in January, in the "Roozetak" building, not far from the Spiegelstraat, as evidenced by the marriage entry of Gsell's daughter Anna in January 1717.

During a visit from Tsar Peter I in 1716/1717 to Amsterdam, Georg Gsell acted as his art advisor. As a connoisseur of Dutch art, he advised Peter the Great on which paintings and other works of art to buy for the Peterhof Palace in St. Petersburg. When Peter the Great returned to Russia, the Gsell-Merian couple entered his service.

In St. Petersburg he worked with his wife first in the art chamber before he was appointed curator of the imperial galleries in 1720. After the death of Peter the Great and his wife, Gsell taught painting and drawing at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg from 1727 and illustrated several publications of the academy, for example, he drew the bowels of lions and fish.

Together with Andrei Matwejew (1701–1739) he painted seven of the eighteen icons on the top of the walls of the new Peter and Paul Cathedral from 1730 to 1732 . He also painted portraits, genre stucco, still lifes on religious and mythological subjects, such as Venus and Cupid (1722, now in the Solothurn Art Museum ). Most of his works are in Russia , four of them in the Peterhof museums, where he himself worked as a curator.

Katharina, a daughter from his first marriage, married the mathematician Leonhard Euler in 1734 . When Katharina died in 1773, Euler married Salome Abigail (1723–1794), a daughter from Georg Gsell's marriage to Dorothea Maria Graff (see above) in 1776.

After Gsell's death in 1740, the whole family stayed in Russia.

literature

  • Otto Gsell: Georg Gsell (1673–1749), court painter of Peter the Great, son-in-law of Maria Sybilla Merian and father-in-law of Leonard Euler . In: St. Galler Kultur und Geschichte , Vol. 11 (1981), pp. 317-358.

Web links

Commons : Georg Gsell  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ^ The descendants of Leonhard Euler
  2. ↑ The wedding date is not known, but the marriage must have taken place after September 28, 1717, because on this day she appears in a notarized contract as "Widow Hendricks"; The couple's first child was born on July 7, 1718 in Saint Petersburg. See Genealogy Dorothea Maria Graff
  3. ^ Entry on Georg Gsell in: PC Molhuysen en PJ Blok (ed.), Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek. Deel 9. AW Sijthoff, Leiden 1933
  4. ↑ Euler's family with references to his descendants
  5. ↑ Gsell's children and their descendants
personal data
SURNAME Gsell, Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss baroque painter, art advisor and art dealer
DATE OF BIRTH January 28, 1673
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Gallen
DATE OF DEATH November 22, 1740
Place of death St. Petersburg