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Idyll in an Obstructed Landscape: The Gessner Cabinet at the Kunsthaus Zurich

Kunsthaus Zürich

Zürich | Switzerland

Feb 26, 2009 - May 16, 2010

In the Europe of the Enlightenment, the drawings and watercolours of Salomon Gessner (1730 鈥�1788) were highly respected. His prose idylls won the Zurich painter-poet world renown, and in North and South America as well as in Russia, Armenia and the Caucasus, Gessner was celebrated for his Arcadian visions. Self-taught, Gessner was instrumental in the development of the sentimental landscape painting, at once meticulously detailed and idiosyncratic. The Kunsthaus show reconstructs Gessner鈥檚 once-celebrated painting cabinet, presented by the city of Zurich to the Z眉rcher Kunstgesellschaft in 1818 on permanent loan as the city鈥檚 first publicly accessible art exhibition, destined to survive both the Napoleonic Wars and the confusion of the Helvetic Republic and serving as the cornerstone of today's Kunsthaus collection as early as the first half of the 19th century