Swiss minor masters
Swiss minor masters were called painter of Switzerland , the 18th from the center to the middle of the 19th century its landscapes and urban scenes on location in their sketchbooks clung to them later in their workshop erase to let and their vistas to small Painted canvas in the wild and then sold it to wealthy tourists. In addition, the small masters also produced drawings and watercolors. Apprentices and journeymen worked in their workshop, who made an engraving or an aquatint based on their master’s model , printed it out, colored it and sold it to collectors.
In their search for motifs, the small masters also made art trips to the Alps. Over the course of 100 years, several hundred artists meet the broad definition of the artist group, which also includes many German artists who worked temporarily or permanently in Switzerland. Around 25 artists emerged from the Bleuler School in Schaffhausen- Feuerthalen alone .
Some Swiss artists trained in the small master schools, e.g. B. Samuel Gränicher, emigrated and reorganized themselves stylistically and thematically. Others, such as Philipp Heinrich Dunker in Nuremberg, painted Swiss genre and landscape pictures abroad. Somewhat pushed into the background, there were also Swiss minor masters such as Elise Wysard-Füchslin or the Bleulers Louise and Caroline and their sister-in-law Nanette Wirz-Bleuler.
The small masters marketed their works like Heinrich and Louis Bleuler in their own publishing house or in art dealers, for which the Fehr'sche Buchhandlung, later Jakob Bürgi in Bern, is to be mentioned as an example.
The end and decline of the Swiss small masters began in the 1820s due to an overheated market, a change in taste, the shift in tourism flows and the emergence of new printing techniques. Several of the group's artists, primarily of German origin , such as Markus Dinkel , Balthasar Anton Dunker and Marquard Wocher, became impoverished or impoverished after 1798.
The European importance of the minor masters is based on the fact that they played a key role in shaping the modern image of Switzerland.
literature
- Tobias Pfeifer-Helke, The Colorists. Swiss landscape graphics from 1766 to 1848, Berlin / Munich 2011.
- Hans Peter Treichler : The mobile wilderness. Biedermeier and the far west. Schweizer Verlaghaus AG, Zurich 1990, pages 113-120. ISBN 3-7263-6523-0
- Albert Müller, Raoul Nicolas, August Klipstein (eds.): The beautiful old Switzerland. The art of the Swiss small masters. Albert Müller Verlag, Zurich / Leipzig 1926.
Web links
- The Gugelmann Collection in the Swiss National Library
- The estate of Schweizer Kleinmeister in the HelveticArchives archive database of the Swiss National Library