Melchior Wyrsch

Johann Melchior Wyrsch ( born August 21, 1732 in Buochs ​​, † September 9, 1798 ) was a Swiss portrait painter of the 18th century.

Life

1745 Wyrsch began his training as a painter. These he -actuated Johann Michael Suter in Lucerne and Franz Anton Kraus in Einsiedeln. Between 1753 and 1754 he lived on a study tour in Italy, in this case mainly in Rome and Naples. Then he returned to Switzerland and began his work as a portrait painter and church. In 1768 he moved to Besançon, where he painted many portraits of distinguished people. Together with the sculptor Luc Breton, whom he had met in Rome, in 1773 he founded an academy for painting and drawing ( Académie de peinture et de dessin ) to Besancon. In 1877 he traveled to Paris, and returned to Besançon, where he was named an honorary citizen in 1784. In the same year he moved to Lucerne, where he founded a school again for a painter. As a result of increasing blindness, which he attributed to the cataracts, he retired to Buochs, where he was murdered by the troops of Napoleon Bonaparte in the conquest of Nidwalden.

In the transition from the Baroque and Rococo Classicism and Romanticism on the one hand to the other hand, took Wyrsch the development from the state portrait for differentiated characterization of a single individual. He was enshrined in the "enlightened paternalism " of the Old Confederacy, but his work has been on the liberal bourgeois era. As a religious painter - many altars in central Switzerland and in the Franche -Comté are still adorned with his paintings - remained the central Swiss painter of the late Baroque tradition arrested. Nevertheless, in his home church, no contemporary painters him is to ask to be equivalent to the side.

Louvre

Ministère de la Culture, Paris: Musée du Louvre: département of Peintures

Besançon

As an honorary citizen of the city of Besançon, a street was named after him ( Rue Jean Wyrsch )