Robert Zünd

Robert Zünd painted the countryside around Lucerne as if the 19th century were not happening to it. Railways were being cut through the Alps in his lifetime and tourists were arriving in crowds, but he kept all of it out of his pictures. What he painted instead were oak woods, harvest fields and still lakeshores, quiet and sunlit.

Born in Lucerne in 1827, he trained for a time in Geneva under Alexandre Calame, the leading Swiss painter of dramatic mountain scenery. Zünd went the other way, toward calm and an almost microscopic detail. His oak and beech woods are built up leaf by leaf, light falling through the branches onto the ground, and each one took him years.

His best-known picture, Der Eichenwald, the oak forest, exists in several versions he returned to across decades, the fullest of them finished in 1882. He also set biblical scenes in that same tidy Swiss light, among them a Road to Emmaus. He kept to the same handful of motifs near Lucerne until his death in 1909.