Wyrsch, a Portrait Painter Who Captured His Era, in Switzerland and in Besançon

La Gazette Drouot, Philippe Dufour

In the year 2025, the reappearance of several paintings by the great Swiss portraitist sounded like an invitation to retrace his long and dual career as artist and teacher.

Less well known to the general public than his two most illustrious compatriots, Jean-Étienne Liotard and Johann Heinrich Füssli, the painter Johann Melchior Wyrsch never ceases to surprise collectors with each of his appearances at auction. This was the case on several occasions last year, when an elegant Portrait de femme au chapeau portant un col de fourrure, a painting in the 1780s, fetched €20,320 on Saturday June 21, under the hammer of Kâ-Mondo in Beaujeu. A few months later, on November 16, a pair of works entitled Portraits d'Hugues Moutrille et de son épouse Jeanne Claude Moutrille, née Colin, dated 1776, fetched €10,128 at Ivoire - Hôtel des ventes de Besançon, Maitre Renoud-Grappin. On November 24, a solemn Portrait de Claude-Irénée Perreney de Grosbois (1756-1840), dated 1779 - premier président au Parlement de Franche-Comté, fetched €6,500 under the hammer of Daguerre at Drouot.

Four works that possess that Swiss quality that characterizes Wyrsch's work and makes it so desirable: an uncompromising realism, far removed from the idealization that the painter always criticized - according to his biographers - the art of French portraiture... "Everything makes it our duty to present this work to the public. Everything makes it our duty to bring this artist back into the limelight: his superior talents, the services he rendered to the teaching of his art, the fertility of his brush...". With these words, historian Francis Wey (1812-1882) saluted Wyrsch's memory at a meeting of the Société d'émulation du Doubs on November 10, 1860, where he recounted the painter's busy life.

The Young Painter's Apprenticeship

He was born in Buochs, a small town in the canton of Nidwalden, on August 21, 1732, to Balthasar Franz Xaver, a farmer and bailiff. At the age of 13, the boy was sent to apprentice with the painter Johann Michael Suter in Lucerne. From here he went to the building site of the Einsiedeln abbey church, his colleague Franz Anton Kraus taught the young Wyrsch the Baroque principles of great religious art. However, he still lacked the essential step for any apprentice painter of the time: a trip to Italy. This he did in 1753, when he entered the studio of Gaetano Lapis in Rome, before perfecting his skills at the Académie de France under its then director, Charles-Joseph Natoire.

The tour of study ended with a stay in Naples, in the company of his friend Luc Breton, a sculptor from the Franche-Comté region. Armed with a solid artistic training, the young painter decided to return to Switzerland to practice his craft. Although he began working in Zurich around 1755, over the next decade he traveled throughout central Switzerland, from Lucerne to Solothurn, receiving commissions for religious paintings from congregations and sanctuaries, a field in which he excelled throughout his life. But Wyrsch soon came to be known above all for his talent as a portraitist, immortalizing on canvas a growing clientele of patricians, landammanns (chief magistrates), ecclesiastics and ladies of the Helvetic aristocracy.

Portrait Painter of Bisontine Society

Like some of his colleagues, Johann Melchior Wyrsch was to achieve his greatest success outside his mountainous homeland. The other two eminent Swiss portrait painters of the 18th century, Jean-Étienne Liotard and Anton Graff, also built their reputations abroad, from England to Constantinople for the former, and in the courts of Prussia and Saxony for the latter... Wyrsch didn't go so far to try his luck: in 1768, we find him in Besançon, a French city for less than a century, and then in full expansion. Here, he painted his most beautiful portraits, whose models bear the names of the great families of Franche-Comté. The most spectacular of these features The de Mollans Family in the Salon of Their Besançon Mansion in 1773. This allegory of family happiness, sold for €90,000 (a record for its creator) by Rouillac in Cheverny at its 21st Garden Party on June 7, 2009 depicts eleven members of the clan: the Count and Countess d'Amédor de Mollans, surrounded by their six children, a daughter-in-law, a son-in-law and a baby.

But Wyrsch's success in Besançon was due above all to the impressive production of smaller bust portraits he delivered to the high society of Besançon. In particular, these numerous representations of aristocratic and bourgeois couples, which regularly resurface on the art market. Among them is a pair of paintings showing Nicolas François Rougnon (1727-1799), Professor of Medicine at Besançon University, and Françoise Bernardine Gresset (1732-1815), His Wife. Produced around 1782-1784, this duet was sold for €9,360 by Millon at Drouot on April 26, 2024.

Wyrsch, From Glory to Drama

Many of the king's officers - numerous in this town dominated by Vauban's fortress - also paraded before the Swiss painter, dressed in their finest uniforms. For example, the young Hippolyte, Chevalier de Fraisans (1784), who garnered €8,680, with his tricorne proudly tilted, in Montbazon on June 19, 2022, on the occasion of the 34th Garden Party organized by Rouillac. But Wyrsch's excellence as a portrait painter was not his only claim to fame in Franche-Comté: in February 1773, in association with his friend the sculptor Luc Breton, he opened a free school of painting and sculpture. The Swiss taught there until 1784, when he decided to return to his native country, much to the regret of the Besançon town council. He settled in Lucerne, where he ran another painting school until total blindness put an end to his career in 1786. Wyrsch, now blind, retired permanently to his house in Buochs. It was here, on September 9, 1798, that he met his most tragic end, shot at point-blank range by a French soldier as the Directoire army invaded the cantons of central Switzerland...