Johann Ludwig Aberli

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Jakob Emanuel Handmann , Portrait of Johann Ludwig Aberli (1751).
Staubbach (around 1760)
Wimmis (1783)

Johann Ludwig Aberli (born November 14, 1723 in Winterthur , † October 17, 1786 in Bern ) was a Swiss painter .

Life

Aberli was the son of a guard and came from a humble background. After a short school time he became a student of the landscape painter Heinrich Meyer. On his advocacy, Aberli was accepted at the drawing school of Johann Grimm in Bern in 1741 at the age of 18 and worked at the same time as a portrait and flat painter .

In the mid-1740s, Aberli went on a trip through the Bernese Oberland with Philipp Hieronymus Brinckmann . Through the impressions of this trip, he began to be more interested in landscape painting. In 1747 he married Christina Barbara Janss von Saanen , with whom he had one daughter who died young. In the same year he succeeded his teacher Johann Grimm, whose drawing school he continued. In the summer he went on study trips with his students to Lake Geneva , Lake Biel and Lake Neuchâtel as well as to the Bernese Oberland.

In the 1750s, Aberli founded his own workshop with a publisher in order to be able to publish his works himself. Among other things, he also trained his own employees, such as the engraver Adrian Zingg , who later became important for Saxony, and the vedutist Samuel Hieronymus Grimm . In 1759 Aberli went with these two to Paris for several weeks to study painting collections and also to get to know Johann Georg Wille's engraving business .

After returning from Paris, Aberli lived and worked with his art shop at Hormansgasse 124, today's Post- und Rathausgasse, in Bern. In Köniz he had a small summer house. Over time, Aberli built up an extensive art collection. He maintained contact with a large number of artists, writers and scholars. The poets Albrecht von Haller , Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger were decisive for his own understanding of art . In addition to the work of his colleagues, Aberli was also interested in the writings of Salomon Gessner , Albrecht von Haller and Jean-Jacques Rousseau . He achieved great financial success with engravings of a number of popular Swiss landscapes. But he was also able to sell his landscape watercolors at a profit. In order to reproduce these watercolors, Aberli developed a process with colored outline etchings (Aberlische Manner). Thereby he founded a branch of the Swiss art industry , which was only supplanted by photography .

In 1774 Aberli traveled to the Jura together with his colleague Sigmund Freudenberger . In 1779 he was visited by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on his second trip to Switzerland.

At the age of 62, Johann Ludwig Aberli died in his last residence, a house opposite the Burgerspital in Bern. His employee Heinrich Rieter continued the business, who consequently also took over the printing plates while the remaining estate was auctioned off.

Today you can see the father of the Swiss small masters in Aberli .

A street in the city of Biel is named after him

literature

  • Frédéric-Charles Lonchamp: J.-L. Aberli (1723-1786). Son temps, sa vie et son oeuvre avec un catalog complet, méthodique et raisonné a) de son oeuvre gravé; b) de l'oeuvre gravé de ses interprétateurs; c) de ses peintures et de ses dessins (crayons, aquarelles, esquisses, etc.) , Paris 1927.
  • Wilhelm Adolf Schmidt:  Aberli, Johann Ludwig . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 1, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1875, p. 20.
  • Tobias Pfeifer-Helke: Aberli, Johann Ludwig. In: Sikart

Web links

Commons : Johann Ludwig Aberli  - Collection of images, videos and audio files


personal data
SURNAME Aberli, Johann Ludwig
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1723
PLACE OF BIRTH Winterthur , Switzerland
DATE OF DEATH October 17, 1786
Place of death Bern