Johann Gottfried Steffan (1815-1905) was one of the most significant Swiss landscape painters of the nineteenth century, a figure whose close affinity with the work of Alexandre Calame led contemporaries to dub him the "German Calame," despite his having spent almost his entire working life in Munich rather than his native Switzerland. Born in Wädenswil, near Zurich, he trained first as a lithographer before travelling to Munich in 1833 to study at the Academy of Fine Arts under Peter von Cornelius, where the landscape painter Carl Rottmann's influence turned him decisively towards a more realistic, naturalistic treatment of landscape.
Steffan's studio in Munich became a gathering point for the city's Swiss artistic community, drawing figures including Rudolf Koller, Johann Caspar Bosshardt and Arnold Böcklin, and he made numerous study trips back to the Swiss Alps, particularly to the Canton of Glarus and Lake Walen, as well as regular expeditions to Berchtesgaden and Ramsau in Bavaria, where he found many of his later motifs. His paintings, prized during his lifetime and today for their faithful observation of rushing mountain torrents, weather-beaten trees and shimmering Alpine lakes, left a substantial body of work, with some five hundred finished paintings recorded, alongside numerous smaller plein-air oil studies that many present-day collectors and scholars regard as fresher and more compelling than his more heavily worked studio compositions. He took on his own pupils in turn, among them Traugott Schiess, also represented in John Mitchell Fine Paintings' collection, and Otto Frölicher, ensuring the continuation of this particular strand of Alpine naturalism into the following generation.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings' research on Steffan has previously featured in its Peaks & Glaciers catalogue, and his work, alongside that of his pupil Traugott Schiess and of Alexandre Calame himself, forms part of the wider Swiss Alpine landscape tradition that the gallery has made a particular area of specialist expertise. His paintings were included in the major 2011 exhibition Forests, Rocks and Torrents at the National Gallery, London, and in the Clark Art Institute's Alpine Views: Alexandre Calame and the Swiss Landscape, confirming his continuing standing alongside Calame as one of the defining figures of nineteenth-century Alpine painting.