Ludwig Hess (18 October 1760, Zürich - 13/16 April 1800, Zürich) was a Swiss landscape painter and engraver.
Zürich or Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zürich. It is located in north-central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zürich. The municipality has approximately 409,000 inhabitants, the urban agglomeration 1.315 million and the Zürich metropolitan area 1.83 million. Zürich is a hub for railways, roads, and air traffic. Both Zürich Airport and railway station are the largest and busiest in the country.
His father was a butcher and he initially became one as well. In 1785, he was enrolled as a member of Guild of the Ram, one of the Zünfte of Zürich, which included butchers and cattle merchants. After 1790, he served as a Grossrat. That same year. he married Anna Barbara Wegmann.
There are fourteen historical Zünfte of Zürich, under the system established in 1336 with the "guild revolution" of Rudolf Brun. They are the 13 guilds that predated 1336, plus the Gesellschaft zur Constaffel, originally consisting of the city's nobles.
The painters Heinrich Wüest[de] and Salomon Gessner were his customers and, as early as 1778, he had begun taking lessons from Wüest. In 1784, he also began studying with Gessner. In 1794, he decided to abandon his trade; making trips to Florence and Rome for further study. Most of his early works were Alpine landscapes, notably of Mont Blanc, Rütli and the Tellskapelle and he was an early practitioner of topography. After 1798, he also did copper engravings.
Salomon Gessner (1730-1788) was a Swiss painter, graphic artist, government official, newspaper publisher and poet; best known in the latter instance for his Idylls.
Mont Blanc, meaning "White Mountain", is the highest mountain in the Alps and the highest in Europe west of Russia's Caucasus peaks. It rises 4,808.7 m (15,777 ft) above sea level and is ranked 11th in the world in topographic prominence. The mountain stands in a range called the Graian Alps, between the regions of Aosta Valley, Italy, and Savoie and Haute-Savoie, France. The location of the summit is on the watershed line between the valleys of Ferret and Veny in Italy and the valleys of Montjoie, and Arve in France, in the middle of what is generally considered to be the border between the two countries.
Rütli or Grütli is a mountain meadow on Lake Lucerne, in the Seelisberg municipality of the Swiss canton of Uri. It is the site of the Rütlischwur in traditional Swiss historiography, the oath marking the foundation of the original Swiss Confederacy. As such it is treated as a national monument of Switzerland. Since 1860, the Schweizerische Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft (SGG) has organized a celebration at the site on Swiss National Day, since 1994 recognized as a public holiday.
In 2005, a previously unknown biography of him was discovered at the ETH Zürich, in the prints and drawings collection, among documents related to the landscape painter, Carl Gotthard Grass (1767–1814).
Ludwig Hess. In: Hans Vollmer (Ed.): Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Begründet von Ulrich Thieme und Felix Becker. Vol.16: Hansen–Heubach. E. A. Seemann, Leipzig 1923, pg.585.
The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland is an encyclopedia on the history of Switzerland that aims to take into account the results of modern historical research in a manner accessible to a broader audience.
Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie is one of the most important and most comprehensive biographical reference works in the German language.
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SIKART is a biographical dictionary and a database on visual art in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. It is published online by the Swiss Institute for Art Research (SIAR). Conceptually and in content, it is an expanded and continually updated online version of the SIAR's 1998 Biographical Lexicon of Swiss Art, which featured 12,000 short entries and some 1,100 detailed biographical articles.
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