On Salomon Gessner: Artist and Poet

Zürich is not a boastful city and its residents do not trumpet the literary triumphs of their historical compatriots.  Take Salomon Gessner for instance: he became one of Europe’s most revered writers with his work translated into 21 languages during his own lifetime.  French Enlightenment star Denis Diderot was his French translator.  The King of England owned four, the Russian Empress, two of his paintings.  Mozart and Goethe visited him at his home in Zürich’s Old Town.  Nearly three decades after his death the Emperor of all Russians, Alexander I, fresh from defeating Napoleon Bonaparte, made a pilgrimage to Zürich in order to pay his respects to Gessner’s aging widow.  And yet, you are forgiven if you've never heard of Salomon Gessner. Such are the vagaries of artistic and literary fame. Salomon Gessner, once more famous than his fellow Swiss Jean-Jacques Rousseau, has almost faded from public memory. 

He was born in 1730 into an old, bookish, patrician Zurich family.  Apart from a year studying the book trade in Berlin, he lived his entire life in a house in Zürich’s Münstergasse, that his father bought when Salomon was six years old.  Together with nineteen other young men from good families he founded the Tuesday Club, a weekly fraternity devoted to wine, friendship, love and poetry.  In 1756 his Idylls appeared followed by The Death of Abel two years later, and his name was made.  Idylls became such a best seller, with two competing translations in English, that it gave us the word “idyllic”. He became a partner in a leading publishing house and founded the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, today still one of the premier newspapers in the German-speaking world.  In the mid-1770s he founded a porcelain factory in the village of Kilchberg. In 1781 Gessner was appointed Silhherr or Lord of the Sihl Forest.  This position entailed the upkeep of the Silh Forest on the outskirts of Zurich, the source of the city’s firewood.  The job included a number of perks, not least a generous wine allowance and an idyllic house deep in the forest.  The house still stands and I must admit, I envy the tenants. 



A view of Gessner's house in the Sihlwald

For the remaining years of his life Gessner spent every summer in the house in the wood on the banks of the river Silh.  Not for him the awful, sublime terror of the Alps.  They were the stuff of nightmares – Alptraumen – not poetry.  Instead his lyrics transmogrified the woody hills near Zürich into a sort of contemporary Arcadia.  His paintings and prints, like his poems, depict waterfalls, trees, cliffs, old bridges, Grecian ruins, the Shepard with his flock, deer and, too often, slender and naked water nymphs. 

In today’s Zürich Gessner’s name is given to a heavily trafficked bridge, a busy street, a theatre and a parking lot. A statue stands in a park that has a reputation for being the site of drug deals. 

Gessner Statue

                    

But his poetry is seldom remembered, not to mention read. One can find his picturesque house at Münstergasse 9, near the bars and cafes of the city’s main nightlife drag, the Niederdorfstrasse and a stones throw from where Georg Buchner died. Here he played host to Goethe and Mozart and his widow was visited by Alexander I.

Gessner's home in Zürich Old Town

Just across the river, a large collection of his pottery is displayed in the Baroque Guildhouse  zur Meisen on the lovely Munsterhof and overlooking the River Limmat. From the city’s main railway station a 25-minute train ride on the S4 line takes one to the beautiful Sihlwald, deep in Gessner’s beloved Sihl Forest.   His house stands just 100 yards from the station. 



Front view of Gessner's Silhwald home

At an ecology centre near his house I once stumbled across a tiny exhibition of his work: a small collection of his porcelain; facsimiles of a few of his poems; copies of a handful of his paintings.  They shared the exhibition space with a  display on beavers and fish-otters.  But the Kunsthaus, as part of its centenary celebrations, is hosting a small Gessner exhibition which runs until May 16th.  Perhaps his time has come again.

The Sihwald in the Snow and in Gessner's Art

Here is a photo taken yesterday afternoon outside my home in a village south west of Zürich.

You can see the beginning of the Silhwald or Sihl Forest.  The trees rise up a steep incline that forms  a part of a ridge of hills, known as the Albis.  On the top of the hill you can spot a wooden tower, a relic from the Thirty Years War that devastated northern and central Europe in the 17^th century and left a third of the German speaking population dead.  The Sihwald forms the oldest and largest mixed deciduous and evergreen forest in central Switzerland.  A place of tranquility and natural beauty, it also possesses cultural and artistic significance.

Here is a photo of my wife, Esther, just as she enters the forest.  In the distance you can see a house, the home of Daniella and Mischa and their children.  It reminds me of what the home of Hansel and Gretel must have looked like, and it is the last inhabited house in the forest proper.    

For centuries the Sihlwald was the property of the Fraumunster nunnery.  The nuns became incredibly rich and earned an income from selling the wood of the forest as fire-wood to the inhabitants of Zürich.  During the Reformation the forest became the property of the city.  One of the most important positions became that of the Sihlherr, or Master of the Forest.  His job was to ensure an endless supply of wood for building and for fires.  In the 19^th century the Silhwald became a locally protected reserve and in 2009 it became a National Park.  Today it is preserved by a policy of minimal maintainance.  No branch is cut unless it forms a danger to human life or unless is carries a contagious disease.  If a tree falls, it is left to rot where it fell.

In the 18^th century Salomon Gessner acquired the position of Master of the Forest.  The job came with a summer-house deep in the forest.  Besides being the most translated poet of the 18^th century, Gessner was a journalist of continent wide fame, a leading ceramicist and a famous painter.  At some future point I will post an article about his many talents.  For now let us briefly consider his artistic work. Gessner was instrumental in the development of the sentimental landscape painting.  He used the Sihlwald, with its caves and steep hills, its river and many small waterfalls,  as his inspiration, but he idealized the forest and populated it with Arcadian temples and Grecian nudes. Though influenced by the ideals of the Enlightenment, one can see the beginnings of romanticism in Gessner’s landscapes of the Sihlwald, with his worship of the woods and his stress on the interiority of the subjective experience of nature.

Today Gessner is little more than a footnote in the History of Art, but his influence on later artists of Northern Romanticism, like Arnold Brocklin, was huge.  Next month Zürich’s Kunsthaus will host a large Gessner exhibition, which is sure to reclaim his reputation somewhat.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a full catalogue, to be published in February.



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