Rudolf Koller

Rudolf Koller (21 May 1828 – 5 January 1905) was a Swiss painter. He is associated with a realist and classicist style, and also with the essentially romantic Düsseldorf school of painting. Koller's style is similar to that of the realist painters Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Considered Switzerland's finest animal painter, Koller is rated alongside George Stubbs, Rosa Bonheur and Théodore Géricault. While his reputation was based on his paintings of animals, he was a sensitive and innovative artist whose well-composed works in the "plein air" tradition, including Swiss mountain landscapes, are just as finely executed. He has been described as "the painter of the Swiss national animal", because of his paintings of cows in Swiss landscapes. He is considered, along with Frank Buchser and Gustave Eugène Castan, to be one of the most important Swiss painters of the 19th century. The Gotthardpost, or The St Gotthard Mailcoach, is one of his most famous paintings. It depicts a mail coach, drawn by white horses, speeding along a mountain road.