Johann Caspar Ulinger

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Self-portrait 1732
Self-portrait 1760

Johann Caspar Ulinger (born April 27, 1704 in Herrliberg ; † July 14, 1768 in Zurich ) was a Swiss draftsman , etcher and engraver .

Life

Johann Caspar Ulinger was the second-born son of the Herrliberg pastor Hans Felix Ulinger (1656–1733) and his wife Johanna Ulinger geb. Müller (1670-1741). There are only a few reliable sources about Ulinger's life. He was trained in Winterthur by Felix Meyer the Elder. J. (1692-1752). At the age of 21 he was a trained eraser; a picture of the Weiherschlösschen Hiltalingen near Basel is signed Joh. Caspar Ulinger fecit 1724 .

At the end of the 1720s, Ulinger seems to have made his way as a portrait painter at various German royal courts. In 1730 he lived as a court painter in Dresden at the court of Augustus the Strong . After his death in 1733, Ulinger returned to Zurich, where he spent the rest of his life.

He lived mainly on the income from the drawing lessons that he occasionally gave. Again and again he made long journeys with his sketchbook, often with his dog, to central Switzerland , the Gotthard region and Lake Constance . In the canton of Graubünden , he drew in remote mountain regions that had hardly ever been visited by an artist.

Towards the end of his life, Ulinger is said to have been mentally confused; the Zurich merchant Hans Caspar Ott-Escher (1740–1799), who owned numerous of his drawings, described him as “shattered in his head”. Due to his illness, the planned engagement to the baker's daughter Esther Schinz (1713–1785) also failed. Ulinger, who remained unmarried, died at the age of 64 in the Predigern Hospital as the last of his family, which has been documented in Zurich since the 15th century.

Ulinger's older brother Hans Jacob (1697–1750) worked as a pastor in Geneva, Basel and Heidelberg. Through his great-great aunt Catharina Klinger geb. Murer (1625–1695) had a family history with Jos Murer , the creator of the well-known Murer plan , which Ulinger may have used as a template for his city vedutas.

plant

The numerous depictions of Ulinger's landscapes and towns are stylistically similar to the works of Johann Melchior Füssli , whose pupil Ulinger could have been. In addition to depictions of Lake Zurich , Ulinger has received numerous pictures from other areas of the canton and the city of Zurich.

In 1740 and 1742 he drew seven castles and mansions for the established David Herrliberger for his work "Actual presentation of the noble castles in the Zurich area". The earliest dated work by Ulinger is from February 1740, it shows a view of the Zurich City Hall Bridge with coopers working on the Limmatstein. Ulinger's latest datable work is a view of the Platzspitz towards the Üetliberg from 1758.

Influenced by his excursions, Ulinger put together an imaginary journey from Zurich over the Rigi to Lake Lucerne , to the Gotthard in the Vorderrheintal , in twelve sheets . In 1765 Ulinger published them as his own etchings under the title Schweizerische PROSPECT vom ORSEREN THAL .

The main part of his work consists of the numerous undated sheets that he brought home from his hikes and excursions.

Plan of the city of Zurich

Plan of the city of Zurich

Ulinger's largest work, a view of the city of Zurich from the west around 1738, consists of eight sheets of hand-made paper , which when put together make an area 101 centimeters high and 142.5 centimeters wide. Client and purpose are not known. Some parts that have only been partially processed, such as the empty field at the bottom left, show that the vedute has remained unfinished. The geometrical model of the vedute, constructed with compasses and ruler, presumably comes from either the mathematician and artillery officer Hans Heinrich Vogel (1671–1753) or the engineer Hans Heinrich Albertin (1713–1790).

Ulinger designed his work with various technical means: the structures inside the jumps are drawn with brown pen, the walls themselves with a brush in light olive, as well as the lower part of the frogs' pit and the meadows at Oetenbach monastery . The landscape outside the city, the trees on the Lindenhof and the waves of the Sihl are executed with a dark brown or gray-black pen and then washed with a gray-blue brush .

Ulinger's light and sketchy view of the city enlivened it with numerous tiny scenes. On the left there is drill and shooting on Schützenplatz, roughly where the main train station is today . Several ships glide over the Sihl and Limmat and on the right the warships Seepferd and Neptun have just left . On the other hand, only a few people are shown.

The lighting comes from the right, it is noon. By shading the buildings and the shadows cast by the numerous trees, Ulinger achieved a high degree of plasticity in his view and an invigorating tension between the view and the floor plan. At the bottom right, on the right of the rider jumping up, Ulinger depicted himself as a seated draftsman.

Due to a number of striking buildings whose architectural history is known, the date of origin of the vedute can be determined very precisely: It was built in 1736 at the earliest, 1739 at the latest. In the spring of 1979, the brittle and slightly damaged original was transferred to a cotton fabric covered with paper.

Detailed views

meaning

Hans Caspar Ott-Escher described Ulinger as a “good draftsman, especially in landscapes”, but as a “mediocre engraver”. It is noticeable that Ulinger did not draw a single Zurich New Year's paper; this in contrast to his contemporaries Johann Melchior Füssli , Johannes Lochmann, David Herrliberger and Johann Balthasar Bullinger , who performed this task several times. Presumably the outsider Ulinger was never considered because of his limited manual skills.

Ulinger remained a loner because of his solitary nature and was soon forgotten after his death.

literature

  • Bruno Weber: Plan vedute of the city of Zurich. Commentary on the reproduction of the originals in the Zurich Central Library . Matthieu Verlag, Zurich 1986.

Web links

Commons : Johann Caspar Ulinger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Ulinger, Johann Caspar
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Uhlinger, Johann Caspar; Uelinger, Johann Caspar; Ulinger, Johannes Caspar
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss etcher, engraver and draftsman
DATE OF BIRTH baptized April 27, 1704
PLACE OF BIRTH Herrliberg
DATE OF DEATH July 14, 1768
Place of death Zurich