Johann Heinrich Wuest was born in Zurich. His first training was in the town of his birth, before he went to the Netherlands, where he was taken in by Jacob Maurer, a compatriot who had settled in Utrecht. Wüest completed his training with Maurer, before returning to Switzerland, and developing a manner of painting that was influenced by his contemporaries and compatriots Caspar Wolf and Adrian Zingg.

His fascination with mountain views and his detailed and imposing images of Swiss glaciers made him one of the precursors of Romantic landscape painting. Human beings, almost absent or reduced to tiny silhouettes, are diminished in the face of nature’s grandeur. In his artwork depicting a waterfall, the painter himself c...