Jean-Bloé Niestlé

In December 1911 the first Blue Rider exhibition opened in Munich, and among its 14 artists was a Swiss animal painter, Jean Bloé Niestlé. Shortly after the opening he withdrew his picture, a willow warbler, a small olive-green songbird. He felt no kinship with the avant-garde course the group was taking.

He was, all the same, one of its oldest friends. Niestlé came from a well-to-do family of printers and publishers in Neuchâtel, moved to Munich to study painting in 1904, and from those first years was close to Franz Marc, the painter of the blue horses, whose animal pictures he influenced. In 1913 a touring exhibition took the large bird paintings he had made since 1908 through German cities.

From 1914 he lived at Seeshaupt on Lake Starnberg, in a house owned by the Berlin collector Bernhard Koehler. A crisis in his work that had begun late in 1913 deepened with the war and the deaths of Marc and of the painter August Macke. After 1919 severe paralysis left him almost unable to paint. In 1938 he moved with his family to Paris, and he died in 1942 at Antony, just outside the city.