Gustav Schneeli Works of Art from the Collection: The portraits of Gustav Schneeli

Gustav Schneeli (1872 - 1944), the son of a extremely wealthy Glarus wood dealer dynasty, is not only one of those personalities who made the construction of the Glarus Art Museum possible in the first place, but he was also an art historian, diplomat, genealogist, and artist. With his grand bourgeois disposition, he preferred to frequent aristocratic circles, which clearly finds expression in his portraits. Schneeli was a leisure painter, who could dedicate himself to art due to his lack of other obligations. Nevertheless, painting was a life's work for him, and he engaged in it with regularity and seriousness.
Schneeli began his artistic activity as a portraitist, the genre which, looking back, suited him the best. He was at pains to capture the spirit of his subjects and thereby to represent the different temperaments. This process of empathy was likewise a method to overcome his own reserved temperament. The facial expression of his portrayed subjects is often pensive or melancholy; Schneeli, who knew melancholic moods himself, recognized these in the persons he painted.
Schneeli devoted himself both as an art historian (as a student of Professor Jakob Burckhardt at the University of Basel) and as an artist to the art of the past. His painting is thus only tangentially affected by contemporary trends.
A selection of Schneeli&'s portraits from the 1910's to 30's will be presented in the small gallery for the first time in years.