"A poetic Alpine watercolourist whose specialty is snow painting" was how the art historian Georg Jacob Wolf described Carl Kessler as early as 1910, a judgement borne out by the specialism Kessler pursued for the remainder of his long career. Born in Coburg in 1876, the son of a private gentleman, he lost his mother at the age of eleven and moved with his father to Markneukirchen, before training as a lithographer and studying at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts and, from 1899, at the Munich Academy under Karl Raupp.
Kessler settled in Munich, exhibiting early work at the Munich Kunstverein in 1902, and by around 1910 had committed decisively to watercolour views of naturalistic winter landscapes, finding his principal subjects in the Bavarian Alps, Tyrol and Switzerland; a commercial career in lithography, which he had continued alongside his painting, he finally abandoned in 1911 to work from his own studio full-time. He exhibited regularly at major venues including the Munich Glaspalast and the Great Watercolour Exhibition in Dresden, showing views such as Kitzbühel and the hospice of St Christoph am Arlberg, and in 1920 was honoured with a dedicated collective exhibition at the Alte Nationalmuseum in Munich, organised by the city's artists' cooperative. In the 1920s he extended his practice into book illustration for the Perthes publishing house, becoming a member of both the South German and national associations of German illustrators. He died in the Munich area in 1968.
The painting by Kessler held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, of winter conditions in the Klosters Valley in Graubünden, exemplifies precisely the sensitive, light-attentive snow scenes for which he was singled out by contemporaries, and reflects a specialism within Alpine painting, the depiction of the mountains under snow, that finds its natural place within the gallery's wider holdings of Swiss and Alpine landscape art.