Sigmund Freudenberger
Born in 1745.
Died in 1801.
Sigmund Freudenberger (1745–1801), a Bernese painter, draughtsman and printmaker, ranks among the foremost Swiss petits maîtres of the eighteenth century. From 1761 onward he trained with the painter Emanuel Handmann, and in 1765 travelled to Paris with the printmaker Adrian Zingg. There he encountered the circles of François Boucher and Johann Georg Wille before returning to Bern in 1773.
His work combines the taste for the Parisian Rococo with close observation of rural Bernese life: his pastel portraits and genre scenes depict its inhabitants, their activities and their dress. This attention to clothing and customs is also evident in the engraved series he conceived. Together with Balthasar Anton Dunker, he illustrated the Heptaméron français (1778–1780), a series commissioned for a re-edition of the work by Marguerite de Navarre.
In 1778, the Bernese authorities granted him a monopoly on the sale of coloured prints. He subsequently published the Premier Cahier des différents Habillements de la Ville de Berne (1785), attesting to the documentary and visual significance of his work for the society of his time. His drawings and prints circulated widely, and several works are now held in museum collections, notably at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Swiss National Library.
Freudenberger embodies the flourishing of Bernese art in the Age of Enlightenment.
