Hans Jakob Oeri

Self-portrait

Hans Jakob Oeri (born December 16, 1782 in Kyburg ; † February 24, 1868 in Zurich ) was a Swiss portrait and history painter , draftsman and lithographer .

biography

Hans Jakob Oeri, born the son of a pastor, spent his youth in Kyburg and Regensdorf . From 1800 he was a student of the Winterthur landscape painter Johann Kaspar Kuster. After two years, Oeri exhibited a self-portrait in Zurich, which was praised by Johann Martin Usteri . In 1803 he traveled to Paris with the portraitist David Sulzer , where he was a student of Jacques-Louis David for four years . In 1804 and 1805 Oeri showed portraits at an art exhibition in Zurich. When he returned there, he took up portrait painting. In 1807 he became a member of the Zurich Artists' Society.

Accompanied by the Basel landscape painter Jakob Christoph Miville, he traveled to Russia in 1809. First both came to Moscow , soon Miville moved to St. Petersburg . Oeri stayed in Moscow, where he worked as a teacher and portrait painter. He was an eyewitness to the fire in Moscow in 1812 , in which he lost many of his works. He then painted many pictures depicting the fire. He stayed in Russia for eight years. Then Oeri settled in Lübeck and finally in Zurich.

In addition to painting, Oeri also dealt with lithography , reproducing portraits as well as works by great masters - Hans Holbein the Younger , Raphael , Friedrich Overbeck - on commission. On the occasion of the five-hundredth anniversary of Zurich's accession to the Swiss Confederation in 1851, Oeri, along with Ludwig Vogel , David Eduard Steiner and Johann Konrad Zeller, was commissioned to decorate the Zurich festival hut. The artists created a large-format historical picture of the return of the victorious people of Zurich from the battle of Tattwil . Oeri created ten quartos Etudes de costumes de tous les siècles de l'ère chrétienne with historical costume studies. Numerous historical compositions that the artist never exhibited were found in Oeri's estate.

literature

• Hans Jakob Oeri. A Swiss artist in Paris, Moscow, Zurich, an art-historical rediscovery. Edited by Valentine von Fellenberg, published by the Kunsthaus Zürich. Zurich 2016, ISBN 978-3-85881-519-4 .

Web links

Commons : Hans Jakob Oeri  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Paola von Wyss-Giacosa: Oeri, Hans Jakob. In: Sikart
• Nasha Gazeta (French)