Jörg Kühn

Jörg Kühn (1940–1964) was a Swiss artist, naturalist and scientific illustrator who specialized in bird paintings and drawings. He was also a children's book illustrator. He is noted for illustrations that are of a particularly scientific and exact nature.

Biography

Kühn's reputation as a master of the exact portrayal of animals is based on a professional career that lasted barely six years during which he worked prolifically. The legacy is regarded as very valuable containing in excess of one hundred colour plates and several hundred line drawings and innumerable field studies of the animals he was illustrating. His depictive style has echoes of Louis Agassiz Fuertes where his illustrations included monographs of forest animals. It has run to at least five editions since it was first published in 1963.

Although Jörg Kühn's is chiefly remembered as a wildlife illustrator he was also commissioned to illustrate a number of medical textbooks including for the Surgery of the Thyroid and Parathyroid Glands

Kühn died in Zürich in October 1964 aged 24 from Hodgkin's lymphoma diagnosed when he was 18 years of age.

Selected solo exhibitions

2009 Landshut Utrenstorf Castle, Zürich – fifty works were shown