Rudolf Müller
Born in 1802.
Died in 1885.
A watercolourist, lithographer and painter, he worked in Basel, Naples and Rome. His gaze was drawn to Mediterranean sites: the coast, the terrain and ancient remains became elements of a carefully constructed image.
The Kunsthaus Zürich preserves his Ruines du temple de Zeus près d’Athènes, an oil on canvas from 1849 that entered the museum through the Schulthess-von Meiss bequest in 1898. The title recalls that Müller’s horizon extended beyond the Italian peninsula alone. In 2020, the museum also acquired a drawing depicting the Gulf of Sorrento and the island of Capri, presented in the context of its Swiss Romantic collections.
The contrast between these places—one marked by Antiquity, the other by the light of the coast—conveys the range of his topographical repertoire.
Müller’s name is linked to that of the Basel painter Friedrich Horner: the Kunsthaus catalogues under their two names a wooded landscape near Naples. This joint attribution invites consideration of the circulation of motifs and practices among travelling artists, while also distinguishing their respective works. The Swiss National Library preserves sheets by Müller in the Gugelmann Collection.
Through drawing, watercolour and painting, his œuvre forms part of that nineteenth-century culture of landscape in which the precision of place enters into dialogue with Romantic composition.
