Albert Anker

Albert Anker was training to become a Protestant pastor when the great museums of Germany changed his mind. At 23 he talked his father, a village vet in Ins in the canton of Bern, into letting him paint instead, and went to Paris to study under Charles Gleyre — the same teacher whose studio would soon hold the young Monet and Renoir.

He learned his craft in the capital of the coming avant-garde, then spent his life turning away from it. Anker went home to his Bernese village and painted what was around him: children at their lessons, a girl embroidering, an old man dozing, a grandfather reading to a child by the stove. The scenes are plain and unsentimental, drawn with close attention and real tenderness.

The Swiss took him to heart and still call him their national painter. A gold medal at the Paris Salon of 1866 gave him standing abroad, but his subject never left the farmhouses of the canton of Bern, where he kept a studio above the family home and worked in it almost to the end.