Caspar Wolf

Caspar Wolf (1735–1783) was born into a family of cabinet makers in the village of Muri in the northern canton of Aargau, Switzerland. From 1749 he studied in Constance under Johann Jakob Anton von Lenz (1701–1764) and from 1769 to 1771 he worked in Paris in the studio of Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), who almost certainly introduced him to the practice of sketching in the open air. Returning to Switzerland, in 1773 Wolf made his first sketching tour of the Alps. In this same year Abraham Wagner (1734–82) employed him to paint a number of landscapes for his engraving project, Remarkable Views of the Swiss Mountains (published 1777, 1778 in French, both editions backdated to 1776). From 1773–1777 Wolf made many trips into the high mountains for the commission, making pencil drawings and Genres: landscape oil sketches on paper, from which he painted finished canvases back in the studio, nearly 200 in all. Wolf was the first artist to penetrate so deeply into the mountains and study in such detail rock formations and water in all its forms. His views were instrumental for the development of Alpine landscape painting in Switzerland in the nineteenth century