Life
Even as a boy Fritz Pümpin has been a keen graphic artist. In 1916/17 he studied drawing and painting with the well known Swiss painter Janet in Colombier, Switzerland. He continued his education as an artist at the school of arts in Basle, Switzerland. His parents decided that he should become a business man in order to take over his father's wine business which he did in 1929. This job, however, did not satisfy him and, after marrying in 1936 he and his wife decided to embark on a fulltime artistic career.
He now also engaged in his hobby, archaeology and he became well known for his discoveries and descriptions of Germanic, Roman, Celtic and Neolithic stations in Northwestern Switzerland. For his merits he became a member of the commission of antiquities of the Canton of Baselland.
During World War II he was a soldier in the Swiss army and was ordered by his superiors to record with pencil and paint brush special historical events. Thus, fascinating and historically valuable sketches and paintings of wartime events along the Swiss border were generated. Paintings of the Red Cross organized transfer of French children to neutral Switzerland, of the arrival of French and American troops at the Swiss border and sketches of the erroneous bombardment of Basle in 1945 are especially singled out.
From 1945 to 1972 - interrupted by various voyages to France, Italy, Spain and Holland - Fritz Pümpin has painted in his beloved Jura area of Northwestern Switzerland. His main subjects were landscapes and villages. He has succeeded in over fifty years of work to capture his homeland with convincing strokes of his paintbrush in his post-impressionist style. Portraits, "nature morts", drawings and paintings from his voyages abroad, from his military service and from his archaeological excavations enrich his work.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“The arbitrary division of one’s life into weeks and days and hours seemed, on the whole, useless. There was but one day for the men, and that was pay day, and one for the women, and that was rent day. As for the children, every day was theirs, just as it should be in every corner of the world.”
—Alice Caldwell Rice (1870–1942)
“Then think I thus: sith such repair,
So long time war of valiant men,
Was all to win a lady fair,
Shall I not learn to suffer then,
And think my life well spent to be,
Serving a worthier wight than she?”
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“It is, in both cases, that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature; that the solid seeming block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought; that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that is, seized their law. In physics, when this is attained, the memory disburthens itself of its cumbrous catalogues of particulars, and carries centuries of observation in a single formula.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)