Georg Gsell

Georg Gsell ( born January 28, 1673 St. Gallen, † November 22, 1740 in St. Petersburg) was a Swiss Baroque painter, art consultant and art dealer.

Life

He received his education from 1690 to 1695 in Vienna with the painter Antoon Schoonjans ( 1655-1726 ). After his training, he lived and worked from 1697 to 1704 in his hometown of St. Gallen. In 1697 he married Marie Gertrud von Loen from Frankfurt am Main. The couple had five daughters, including Catherine Gsell, which was in 1707, born in Amsterdam, which later became the first wife of the mathematician Leonhard Euler.

1704 Gsell moved to Amsterdam. After the death of his first wife (13 May 1713) he was in 1714/1715 briefly married to Anna Horst Mans. This marriage ended in separation. In 1717 he married for the third time, this time the Dorothea Maria Hendriks widow (Nuremberg, February 2, 1678 to May 5, 1743 St. Petersburg ), daughter of the naturalist and painter Maria Sibylla Merian and the Nuremberg still life and architectural painter Johann Andreas Graff (the parents were divorced). She was also a painter who had traveled with her mother some time to Suriname, where they had the drawings and paintings of local flora and fauna painted. She was interested in how the mother especially flowers and insects. The couple lived in Amsterdam together with the parent in the building of Roozetak in Kerkstraat, not far from the Spiegelstraat. The couple's daughter, Salome Abigail, born in 1723, later became the second wife of the mathematician Leonhard Euler.

During a visit by Tsar Peter I in the years 1716/1717 in Amsterdam Georg Gsell acted as his art consultant. As a connoisseur of Dutch art, he advised Peter the Great, which paintings and other works of art he should buy for the Peterhof Palace in St. Petersburg. When Peter the Great went back to Russia, the couple Gsell Merian came into his service.

In St. Petersburg, he worked with his wife first in the Kunstkammer, before being appointed in 1720 to the curator of the Imperial Galleries. After the death of Peter the Great and his wife Gsell taught painting and drawing in 1727 at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg and illustrated several publications of the Academy, for example, he drew the entrails of lions and fish.

Together with Andrei Matveyev (1701-1739) he painted from 1730 to 1732, seven of the eighteen icons at the top of the walls of the new Peter and Paul Cathedral. He also painted portraits, genre pieces, still life of religious and mythological subjects, such as the Venus and Cupid (1722, now in the Kunstmuseum Solothurn ). Most of his works are located in Russia, four of them in the museums of Peterhof, where he has worked as a curator.

His daughter, Katherine, from his first marriage, married in 1734, the mathematician Leonhard Euler. When Catherine died in 1773, Euler married in 1776 Salome Abigail ( 1723-1794 ), a daughter of the third marriage of Georg Gsell, and granddaughter of the painter Maria Sibylla Merian.

After Gsells death in 1740 the whole family stayed in Russia.