Albert Schnyder was a searching artist between tradition and modernity, who was declared the "painter of the Jura" with his landscape paintings. As the son of a locomotive driver, he grew up in petty bourgeois circumstances, first completed an apprenticeship as a lithographer in Bern and in 1918 transferred to the School of Arts and Crafts in Basel. This was followed by study visits to Berlin and Munich, where he came into contact with the international artistic avant-garde - with Expressionism, the artists' group "Der Sturm" and in particular with the works of Oskar Kokoschka, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso and André Derain.

In the fall of 1924 Schnyder settled in his birthplace of Delémont, where over the next six d...