Gottfried Keller

Gottfried Keller (Zurich, 1819-1890) is remembered today mainly as a novelist and poet in German, but his first vocation was painting. Born in Zurich during the Napoleonic upheavals, he trained as an apprentice to landscape and watercolour painters in his home city, and that discipline of the eye shaped his outlook for the rest of his life. Among the works attributed to him is Heroic Landscape (1842), a plainly executed landscape that reflects the craft he had learned in the studio.

Between 1834 and 1837 he apprenticed with the landscape painter Steiger and then with the watercolourist Rudolf Meyer. In 1840 he went to Munich to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, a training that gave him a trade without securing a steady career. Back in Zurich in 1842, despite his talent, he gradually moved away from the brush. His biographer Hartmann describes those years as almost inactive, marked by a strong pull toward radical politics.

His stays in Heidelberg and Berlin, from 1848 to 1856, proved decisive. In Heidelberg he came under the influence of the philosopher Feuerbach, and in Berlin he settled on literature as his career. There he wrote the semi-autobiographical novel Green Henry (Der grüne Heinrich), which grew out of his youth as a would-be painter and reached a rounded form in its second version of 1879. He also published Seldwyla Folks, stories of Swiss village life.

Back in Zurich he served as First Official Secretary of the canton from 1861 to 1876, and afterwards lived as a bachelor with his sister Regula. His reputation rests on fifteen short stories and on his collected poetry of 1883, yet his early years as a painter help explain the precision with which he describes landscape and everyday life.