Rudolf Müller (landscape painter)
Rudolf Müller (born June 24, 1802 in Basel , † February 22, 1885 in Rome ) was a Swiss landscape painter.
Life
At the age of 15, Müller and his childhood friend Friedrich Horner left Basel in order to earn the money he needed to live and travel, initially in the Alps, mainly for English travelers. In the Bernese Oberland they met a family from England, who supported them and sent them to Paris for further training. Like most of the young painters of the time, Müller and Horner were drawn to Italy. They traveled to Naples in 1822, where they worked for 13 years, so successfully that they were granted honorary citizenship by the city council. From 1838 onwards, the two painters lived in Rome, which they had to leave during the revolution and restoration period in 1848/9 due to a lack of commissions and return to Basel. Rudolf Müller returned to Rome a few years later, where he married Waldburga Güttinger from Zurich in 1864 and stayed there until his death on February 22, 1885. In Rome he was on friendly terms with other Swiss artists, such as the landscape painter Johann Jakob Frey and the sculptor Ferdinand Schlöth . His grave is on the Cimitero acattolico in Rome.
plant
Rudolf Müller mainly depicted landscapes and monuments of Rome and the Campagna as well as the areas in the Albanian and Sabine Mountains, Naples and the picturesque towns and coastal landscapes on the Gulf of Naples and on the Amalfi coast as far as Paestum . He was one of the first Swiss to travel and portray Sicily and Greece as far as Istanbul.
Rudolf Müller's works found primarily buyers from England and Russia. The Swiss, who were on their own and did not belong to any of the major schools in Rome, had a hard time selling their pictures in view of the great competition, as can be seen from the few letters of Müller in the Basel State Archives and those of Jacob Burckhardt . In addition to Rome and Naples, Rudolf Müller also sold his works at the usual art exhibitions in European capitals.
Müller's watercolors follow the tradition of vedute painting in that they always show real and clearly identifiable landscapes and monuments. The artistic lies in Müller's ability to aesthetically idealize the real landscapes, for example by combining two different perspectives on the same picture and thus the view appears aesthetically more beautiful and, so to speak, more effective than reality, despite all the "factual fidelity".
As far as the technique of painting is concerned, Müller's watercolors go beyond the vedute of other contemporaries and are to be regarded as high-ranking painting of the Romantic period: on the one hand, the color technique developed together with Horner allowed him to express his own, unmistakable color mood. On the other hand, especially in his late work, Müller uses an increasingly airy "pointed" technique that proves that Müller, in contrast to mere vedutists, experienced his own artistic development.
literature
- Carl Brun (Editor): Swiss Artist Lexicon . Volume 2, Huber & Co., Frauenfeld 1908, pp. 446-447 ( digitized version ).
- Yvonne Boerlin-Brodbeck: Swiss drawings 1800–1850 from the Basler Kupferstichkabinett . Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel 1991
- Jacob Burckhardt Letters, Vol. 6, edited by Max Burckhardt . Schwabe & Co., Basel 1966
- Marie Therese Bätschmann: Swiss drawings 1850–1900 from the Basler Kupferstichkabinet. 2001.
- Die Weltkunst , Volume 72, Issues 7-10, 2002, p. 1256.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Stefan Hess / Tomas Lochman (eds.), Classical beauty and patriotic heroism. The Basel sculptor Ferdinand Schlöth (1818–1891) , Basel 2004, p. 27.
- ↑ Stefan Hess / Tomas Lochman (eds.), Classical beauty and patriotic heroism. The Basel sculptor Ferdinand Schlöth (1818–1891) , Basel 2004, p. 46f.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Müller, Rudolf |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swiss landscape painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 24, 1802 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Basel |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 22, 1885 |
| Place of death | Rome |