Johann Melchior Wyrsch

On 9 September 1798 French troops stormed the small Swiss valley of Nidwalden to break its resistance to the new Helvetic Republic, the state France had imposed on Switzerland. Among the villagers killed at Buochs was a painter of 66 who had gone nearly blind. Johann Melchior Wyrsch had come home to end his days quietly, and the invasion caught him there.

He had been born in that same village in 1732 and made a long career far from it. After studying in Lucerne and travelling through Rome and Naples, he settled in the French city of Besançon, where he painted portraits of its leading citizens for years. In 1773, with the sculptor Luc Breton, a friend he had met in Rome, he helped found the city's academy of drawing and painting, which still exists.

Failing eyesight from cataracts eventually pushed him out of the studio and back to Switzerland. His portraits, sober and closely observed, are held today mainly in Besançon and in central Switzerland.