Rudolf Koller

Rudolf Koller (21 May 1828 – 5 January 1905) was a Swiss painter. He is associated with a realist and classicist style, and also with the essentially romantic Düsseldorf school of painting.

He has been described as "the painter of the Swiss national animal", because of his paintings of cows in Swiss landscapes. He is considered, along with Frank Buchser and , to be one of the most important Swiss painters of the 19th century. The Gotthardpost, or The St Gotthard Mailcoach, is one of his most famous paintings. It depicts a mail coach, drawn by white horses, speeding along a mountain road.

Life

Koller was born in Zürich in 1828. In 1830 his father, Johann Heinrich, was a butcher and brewer, who became the innkeeper at the "Schwarzen Adler" hotel, in the centre of the city near the river. His mother was Maria Ursula née Forster. As the clientele were mostly waggoners and cattle dealers, Koller saw horses and cattle on a daily basis. He started his education at a private school; later he attended an elementary school called Fraumünster. and took private painting classes with them. Ulrich, who was a successful painter of landscapes and animals, influenced him further in his choice of themes during his artistic career. Rudolf Koller travelled together with his friend Arnold Böcklin to Brussels and Antwerp, in 1847.

With the support of the artists’ colony at Barbizon, Koller painted scenes in outdoor settings. In 1848, plagued by financial difficulties, he returned from France to Zürich.

From April 1851 he again lived in Zürich, where he became friends with the Swiss painters Robert Zünd and Ernst Stückelberg. Koller opened a studio in Zürich, as a result of which he obtained numerous commissions for paintings of animals. In 1852–53, in association with Zünd, he painted several landscape studies near the Walensee, a large lake in eastern Switzerland. He became friends with the Swiss Bildungsroman novelist Gottfried Keller, the cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt and the novelist and playwright Friedrich Theodor Vischer. During 1858, Koller travelled to the Swiss Canton of Glarus; his work Richisau dates from this trip.

In 1862 Koller bought a chalet on the eastern shore of Lake Zürich, where he was to live for the rest of his life. There he kept various animals, mainly to study them as painting subjects. He often painted rustic farm scenes, landscapes and scenes that depicted animals. He loved animals and treated them in his pictures as representing part of the forces of unspoiled nature. In 1868–69 his travels took him to Florence, Rome and Naples. To honour the 100th anniversary of his death the Hotel Adler fitted a "stand-up bar for dogs", consisting of cast-iron water troughs, to the outside wall of the hotel. The bar has a mechanism which refreshes the water every 30 minutes.

Works