Traugott Schiess (1834-1869) was a Swiss landscape painter whose brief but intensely productive career was devoted almost entirely to the mountains of his native country. Born in St Gallen, he trained under Johann Gottfried Steffan in Munich, absorbing Steffan's naturalistic, closely observed approach to Alpine scenery before beginning his own independent practice.
Although his working career as a landscape artist lasted only fifteen years, cut short by his early death in Munich in 1869, Schiess was a remarkably prolific painter, undertaking annual painting and sketching trips into the Swiss Alps every summer from 1857 until the end of his life. He worked extensively around Zermatt at a time when the valley remained genuinely remote and difficult to reach, well before the tourist infrastructure that would later transform the region, and his surviving sketchbooks preserve numerous studies of the Matterhorn, mountain paths and Alpine flora made directly from nature during these expeditions. His subjects extended across Switzerland more broadly, taking in lake and forest scenes, rocky torrents and rural landscapes with sheep and shepherds, all rendered with the fresh, direct observation characteristic of the Munich school's naturalistic Alpine painters.
John Mitchell Fine Paintings' holdings of Schiess include studies drawn directly from his working sketchbooks, among them a watercolour of the Matterhorn made during one of his Zermatt expeditions, offering a rare glimpse of the working method behind his finished compositions. His close artistic relationship with his teacher Johann Gottfried Steffan, also represented in the gallery's collection, situates Schiess firmly within the naturalistic strand of nineteenth-century Alpine landscape painting that the gallery has made a particular area of specialist research through its Peaks & Glaciers exhibitions.