Caspar Wolf
Born in 1735.
Died in 1783.
The son of a carpenter, he studied painting under Johann Jakob Anton von Lenz in Constance, then worked in several cities in southern Germany. Returning to Muri in 1760, he carried out religious and decorative commissions. He subsequently stayed in Basel and then in Paris, where his contact with French painting contributed to his artistic development.
From 1773 onwards, Wolf travelled through the Swiss Alps with the Bernese publisher Abraham Wagner and the naturalist Jakob Samuel Wyttenbach. On site, he painted oil studies, which he then transformed into studio paintings combining precise observation with constructed composition. The works were intended for a print-publishing enterprise: the series *Merkwürdige Prospekte aus den Schweizer-Gebürgen* and *Alpes Helveticae* appeared in the late 1770s.
His compositions of glaciers, torrents and peaks departed from the idyllic landscape then prevalent; they contributed to a new aesthetics of the sublime and heralded Romanticism. The Kunstmuseum Basel also emphasises the documentary and emotionally responsive ambition of these views, as well as the tiny scale of the human figures before the immensity of the mountains.
