Peter Vischer

1779–1851, Basel

Peter Vischer, a merchant from Basel, was an extraordinarily talented amateur artist who created a small and rare corpus of etchings. Apprenticed to Samuel Birmann, his prowess in the art of drawing was, according to Nagler, “of a degree of perfection not attained by every professional artist”. Vischer’s etchings, consisting entirely of landscapes, were the product of his own imagination or based on originals by Dutch masters, such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Jan Both.