Rudolf Koller

In 1873 the Swiss Northeastern Railway wanted a retirement gift for Alfred Escher, the financier who had championed the great tunnel under the St. Gotthard pass. They turned to Rudolf Koller, and he answered with a painting of the very thing that tunnel was about to make extinct: a horse-drawn mail coach thundering downhill, the lead horses shying at something off the road, a dog scrambling out of the way.

Koller was by then the most sought-after animal painter in Switzerland, a Zürich man who had trained at the Düsseldorf academy in Germany and spent his life studying horses and cattle up close, often on his own small farm by the lake. The Gotthardpost caught the country at a hinge, the slow Alpine coach roads giving way to iron and steam. He liked the picture enough to paint a second version the next year for a Zürich bank.

The original hangs in the Kunsthaus Zürich, and it became one of the best-known images in the country, reproduced countless times over. Koller went on working by the water at Zürich until his death in 1905, still drawing the animals he had watched for 50 years.