Georg Gsell (russian: Георг Гзелль; 28 January 1673 – 22 November 1740) was a

Swiss Swiss may refer to: * the adjectival form of Switzerland * Swiss people Places * Swiss, Missouri * Swiss, North Carolina *Swiss, West Virginia * Swiss, Wisconsin Other uses *Swiss-system tournament, in various games and sports *Swiss Internation ...

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

painter, art consultant and art dealer. Gsell was born in

St. Gallen , neighboring_municipalities = Eggersriet, Gaiserwald, Gossau, Herisau (AR), Mörschwil, Speicher (AR), Stein (AR), Teufen (AR), Untereggen, Wittenbach , twintowns = Liberec (Czech Republic) , website ...

where he married his first wife in 1697, Marie Gertrud von Loen of

Frankfurt am Main Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian: , "Frank ford on the Main"), is the most populous city in the German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located on its na ...

. They moved to

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the Capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population ...

in 1704 where their fifth daughter Katharina was born in 1707. His wife died and he remarried Anna Horstmans, but divorced her in 1715, when he married a third time to Dorothea Maria Merian, the daughter of

Maria Sibylla Merian Maria Sibylla Merian (2 April 164713 January 1717) was a German naturalist and scientific illustrator. She was one of the earliest European naturalists to observe insects directly. Merian was a descendant of the Frankfurt branch of the Swiss Mer ...

. The couple was recruited by Peter the Great in 1716 and went to Russia, where he became first curator of the Imperial art gallery founded in 1720. His wife, Maria-Dorothea, became the curator of the

Kunstkamera The Kunstkamera (russian: Кунсткамера) or Kunstkammer (German for "Culture Room" (literally) or "Art Chamber", typically used for a " cabinet of curiosities") is a public museum located on the Universitetskaya Embankment in Saint Pete ...

. Their daughter Katharina married mathematician

Leonhard Euler Leonhard Euler ( , ; 15 April 170718 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in ma ...

in 1734. Gsell died, aged 67, in

St. Petersburg Saint Petersburg ( rus, links=no, Санкт-Петербург, a=Ru-Sankt Peterburg Leningrad Petrograd Piter.ogg, r=Sankt-Peterburg, p=ˈsankt pʲɪtʲɪrˈburk), formerly known as Petrograd (1914–1924) and later Leningrad (1924–1991), i ...

and his wife survived him by three years. He is known for his catalog of the Kunstkamera in manuscript form, that has recently been rediscovered.
De Kunstkamera van Peter de Grote
', by Jozien J. Driessen-van het Reve, 2006, p. 203

Literature

* Otto Gsell: Georg Gsell (1673–1749), Hofmaler Peters des Grossen (Courtpainter of

Peter the Great Peter I ( – ), most commonly known as Peter the Great,) or Pyotr Alekséyevich ( rus, Пётр Алексе́евич, p=ˈpʲɵtr ɐlʲɪˈksʲejɪvʲɪtɕ, , group=pron was a Russian monarch who ruled the Tsardom of Russia from t ...

)

References

External links

*
Georg Gsell on Swiss World

A work of Georg Gsell sold at Christie in 2000
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gsell, Georg 1673 births 1740 deaths 17th-century Swiss painters Swiss male painters 18th-century Swiss painters 18th-century Swiss male artists Baroque painters Russian people of Swiss descent Merian family People from St. Gallen (city)