Johann Ludwig Aberli

Johann Ludwig Aberli ( born November 14, 1723 in Winterthur, † October 17, 1786 in Bern ) was a Swiss painter.

Life

Aberli was the son of a sergeant 's and came from a humble background. After a short school years, he became a pupil of the landscape painter Heinrich Meyer. On his intercession, 1741 Aberli was adopted by 18 years in Bern at the Drawing School of Johann Grimm, and worked simultaneously as a portrait painter and flat.

The mid- 1740s - years undertook together with Philipp Hieronymus Brinckmann Aberli a ride through the Bernese Oberland. Due to the impressions of this journey he began to show more interest in landscape painting. In 1747 he succeeded his teacher Johann Grimm, whose art school he continued. With his students, he undertook as a result in the summer study trips to Geneva, Biel and Lake Neuchâtel, in the Bernese Oberland.

In the 1750s Aberli founded his own workshop with a publisher to publish his works to himself. Among other things, he made approach also own employees, so the later for Saxony major engraver Adrian Zingg and Samuel Hieronymus Grimm the Vedutisten. 1759 went Aberli with these two for several weeks to Paris to study painting collections and also to learn about the operation of engraver Johann Georg Wille.

After returning from Paris, lived and worked Aberli with his art shop in Bern and put in time to an extensive art collection. Contact he used to a large number of artists, writers and scholars. For one's own understanding of art him the poet Albrecht von Haller, Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger were crucial. In addition to the work of his colleagues Aberli but was also interested in the writings of Salomon Gessner, Albrecht von Haller and Jean -Jacques Rousseau. He achieved great financial success with engravings of a number of popular Swiss landscapes. But he could profitably sell his landscape watercolors. To reproduce these watercolors, Aberli developed a process with colored outline etchings ( But Metallic manner ). Thus he founded a branch of the Swiss art industry, which until the advent of photography.

1774 Aberli traveled together with his colleague Sigmund Freudenberger the Jura. In 1779 he was visited by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe on his second trip to Switzerland.

At the age of 62 years Johann Ludwig Aberli died in Bern. The business continued his employee Heinrich Rieter, which consequently took over the printing plates, while the remaining estate was auctioned.

Today you can see in Aberli the father of the Bernese minor masters.