Landscape painter Robert Zünd was born in Lucerne into an affluent family of Roman Catholic faith. He was born to his father Josef Zünd (1793-1858), an influential catholic-conservative politician (mayor of Luzern), high-ranking military officer, judge and commercial agent, and to his mother Franziska Zünd, née Thüring. After attending the "Gymnasium", and some first drawing classes, he received private tuition by Jakob Joseph Zelger (1812-1885) in Stans. Zelger was a painter of alpine vedutas which were usually sold to the first British tourists who "discovered" Switzerland at that time. On Zelger's personal recommendation, Zünd went on studying painting by becoming an assistant at the Geneva workshops of François Diday (1802-1877) and Alexandre Calame (1810-1864). Despite this important influence, and a lifelong friendship to fellow art student Rudolf Koller (1828-1905), Zünd is today considered to be a solitary among artists of his time, his œvre being wholly independent, not belonging to any school of painting. Obviously too, he did not depend on an income derived from selling paintings to foreign travellers, which is why he is probably less known outside of Switzerland. The young artist’s "Grand Tour" remained a rather short episode; leading him to Munich in 1851, and Paris in 1852, but not to Rome, the latter being a customary and essential experience for any young painter at that time. The following year Robert Zünd married Theresia Bühler, whose father owned a textile bleaching factory. His life continued on its quiet and carefree course, only interrupted by a journey to Dresden in 1860, where he copied some of his most admired French and Dutch masters. Seeking privacy and seclusion, Zünd settled near Lucerne in 1863 and left the town and its surrounding valleys and countrysides only on a few short occasions thereafter. He created landscape paintings of meticulous detail, being most interested in large beautiful trees, on which he often focused in an almost portrait-like manner, making them the narrative centre of his compositions. Robert Zünd’s bright and optimistic paintings became popular among Swiss art collectors and received public recognition, most notably by famous liberal writer Gottfried Keller (1819-1890), who praised them for their harmonic balance between romantic conceptions of idealized landscape and a more realistic representation of nature. Robert Zünd was given an honorary doctorate of the University of Zurich in 1906. Two of his major works are "Die Ernte" (1860), and "Gang nach Emmaus" (1877), which are today on permanent public display at the Öffentliche Kunstsammlung Basel-Kunstmuseum and the Kunstmuseum Sankt Gallen respectively. He was deservedly brought back to a large art public’s attention thanks to the 1998 national exhibition "Von Anker bis Zünd: Die Kunst im neuen Bundestaat 1848-1900".

biography by Robert Savary