Gottfried Keller

Biography

The picture Keller painted in Munich with high hopes and sent to an exhibition in Zurich arrived damaged, interested nobody and remained unsold. Today it is known as “Heroic Landscape”. It is perhaps the only one of his paintings that is usually mentioned by title.

Gottfried Keller was born on 19 July 1819 in Zurich, the son of Rudolf Keller, a master lathe-worker from Glattfelden. His father died of tuberculosis in 1824, when the boy was five. Of the six children in the family only his sister Regula, born in 1822, survived. His mother soon married again, but the marriage broke down within a few months, and she lived on the income from the house and her own work. Gottfried first attended a school for poor children, on whose board his father had sat, and then the cantonal Industrieschule, a secondary school with a science and modern-subjects curriculum. He was expelled in 1834, before he was fifteen: after a noisy demonstration by older pupils outside the house of an unpopular teacher, he was named as the culprit.

His choice of career was decided by his childhood drawings and a painting exhibition in Zurich. Despite his mother’s doubts, he resolved to become a landscape painter. His first teacher, who ran a workshop producing coloured views, taught him little. In 1837 he met the watercolourist Rudolf Meyer, who taught him for the first time to look and to work from nature, but who left Zurich the following spring. In the notebooks of those years, written entries increasingly appear beside the drawings: extracts from his reading, sketches for stories, plans for plays.

In 1840 Keller received a small inheritance and went to Munich, to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. He never became a pupil of the academy, since landscape painting was not taught there, and he worked on landscape compositions with friends. His money ran out; he ate one meal a day, fell ill with typhus and ran into debt, while his mother sent him whatever she could, in the end borrowed money. In the autumn of 1842 he had to return, having sold most of his work to a junk dealer to pay for the journey.

In Zurich he rented a small studio, but in the winter of 1842–43 he read and wrote more than he painted. It was then that he first conceived the idea of a sad novel about a young artist whose career ended in failure and ruined both mother and son. In 1843, under the impression of Georg Herwegh’s political poems, he began to write verse himself. His former teacher Julius Fröbel, by then a publisher, showed it to Adolf Ludwig Follen, who became Keller’s mentor and corrected his lines, to my mind not to their benefit. In 1844 and 1845 Keller took part in two expeditions of Zurich volunteer corps against Lucerne; there was no contact with the enemy. His first collection, “Gedichte”, appeared in 1846 in Heidelberg. It was impossible to live on literary journalism, and in 1848 the government of Zurich granted him a stipend for a period of study.

He went to the University of Heidelberg, where he heard lectures on history, law, literature, anthropology and philosophy, among them those of Ludwig Feuerbach, and he largely came to share Feuerbach’s views on religion. In 1850 Keller moved to Berlin and lived there until 1855. He wanted to become a playwright, but wrote prose instead: “Neuere Gedichte” (1851), the novel “Green Henry” (1855; second version 1879–80) and the first two volumes of “Seldwyla Folks” (1856), which include “A Village Romeo and Juliet” and “The Three Righteous Comb-Makers”. The novel grew out of a short story he had planned and came to cover his own youth and the career of an unlucky painter up to 1842. Critics received it coolly.

After returning to Zurich, Keller became in 1861 First Official Secretary of the canton’s government (Staatsschreiber), and the post nearly absorbed him for ten years. He published new work only in the last years of his tenure: “Seven Legends” (1872) and the second volume of “Seldwyla Folks” (1874). In 1876 he retired and went back to writing as a free author; his sister Regula kept house for him. Then came “Zurich Novellas” (1878), which contains “The Banner of the Upright Seven”, “Das Sinngedicht” (1881), “Collected Poems” (1883) and the socially critical novel “Martin Salander” (1886).

Keller died in Zurich on 15 July 1890. In the same year Lydia Escher established a foundation in his name, linked to an art collection now based in Winterthur.