(b Basle, 11 Aug 1793; d Basle, 27 Sept 1847). Son of (1) Peter Birmann. From about 1811 he worked in his father’s studio, where he drew mainly landscapes in pencil, pen, watercolour and bistre (e.g. Rigi, 1814; Basle, Kstmus.). In 1815 he went to Rome with the landscape painters Jakob Christoph Bischoff (1793–1825) and Friedrich Salathé (1793–1858). He executed a few oil paintings and also studies and detailed landscapes, usually in the hills around Rome, for which he employed pen, pencil, watercolour and wash. In 1817 he visited Sicily and produced drawings of luminous horizons in a Romantic vein, precisely delineated, yet with an economy of detail. In late 1817 he returned to Basle and worked in his father’s business while sketching in the Alps each summer. In 1818 he exhibited in Berne and in 1820, 1821 and 1825 in Zurich. In 1822, together with a group of other Swiss artists that included his brother Wilhelm Birmann, he went to Paris to work on an edition of Voyage pittoresque en Sicile (Paris, 1822, rev. 1826) for the publisher Jean Frédéric Ostervald (1773–1850); while there he exhibited at the Salon. He set up his own publishing house in Basle and issued Souvenirs de l’Oberland bernois (n.d.) and Souvenirs de la vallée de Chamonix (1826). In his studies of trees, as well as in his larger landscapes of the Alps from 1829 (e.g. Sawmill in the Lauterbrunn Valley, 1843; Basle, Kstmus.), there is an increased interest in a Romantic vision of the forces that animate nature. In the 1830s periods of depression began to impede his artistic creativity, and he committed suicide in 1847.

Part of the Birmann family

• Birmann, Samuel
  • Birmann
  • Switzerland, §III, 4: Painting and graphic arts: Neo-classicism and early Romanticism, c 1770–c 1850