Karl Stauffer-Bern

Karl Stauffer-Bern: The Engraver Destroyed by a Federal Councillor

In the summer of 1890 a Swiss artist sat in an Italian jail charged with kidnapping and rape. The charges collapsed for want of evidence. They had been engineered by the father-in-law of the woman he loved — a sitting member of the Swiss Federal Council — who had also arranged for her to be shut in a Roman asylum. Within eighteen months both the artist and the woman were dead by their own hands. Karl Stauffer-Bern was thirty-three, and had been called one of the most talented printmakers of his time.

A Pastor's Son from the Emmental

He was born on 2 September 1857 in Trubschachen, in the Emmental valley. His father was a curate and later a pastor in Bern. It was a provincial, devout, unartistic background, and Stauffer's exit from it went through Munich.

At the Academy of Fine Arts there he studied under Feodor Dietz and Ludwig von Löfftz, and absorbed the realism associated with Courbet — an unblinking commitment to painting what was actually in front of him rather than what convention prescribed. When he brought that manner back to Bern it caused trouble: his contemporaries found the realism excessive. In 1880 he left for Berlin.

Berlin

Berlin made him. He set up as a portrait painter and acquired a substantial list of notable sitters, including a study of Federal Councillor Emil Welti in 1887 — a detail that acquires a cruel irony in retrospect. He painted the German artist Adolf von Menzel. He painted his own sister Sophie. He painted himself repeatedly; at least five self-portraits are documented, an unusual quantity for so short a career and a sign of relentless self-examination.

He also had contempt for the official art of his moment. In 1885 the Academy favoured enormous canvases of battlefields, and Stauffer had little respect for them. His subjects were faces — family, friends, prominent Swiss and Germans — treated with a directness that had no room for pageantry.

The Burin

The decisive event of his artistic life was technical. In 1884 the German etcher Peter Halm introduced him to etching and engraving, and Stauffer took to it with startling speed, quickly becoming one of the most talented printmakers of his time.

This was not a sideline. Engraving suited exactly what he wanted from portraiture: absolute control over line, the ability to model a face in pure incision without the seductions of colour. One assessment of his work puts it plainly — it is difficult to name another engraver who could equal his subtlety and mastery in depicting the human face.

Alongside this he taught at the Berlin School for Women Artists, and here his influence outran his own output. His students included Hedwig Weiß, Clara Siewert, and Käthe Kollwitz. It was Stauffer who introduced Kollwitz to the work of Max Klinger — a decisive push toward printmaking for the artist who would become the twentieth century's greatest graphic chronicler of grief. A significant portion of Stauffer's claim on posterity rests on that single act of teaching.

Rome, and the Weltis

In August 1885 he met Lydia Welti-Escher through her husband, Friedrich Emil Welti. Lydia was the daughter of the railway magnate Alfred Escher and the heiress to his fortune. The couple became Stauffer's patrons: he was a frequent guest at their Villa Belvoir, and they gave him financial support and studio space to paint portraits.

With Welti family sponsorship he went to Rome in 1888 to study sculpture — a third discipline added to painting and engraving. He was, as one account describes him, a poet, painter, sculptor and etcher.

In October 1889 the Weltis moved to Florence. Friedrich Emil returned to Switzerland on business. Lydia and Stauffer fell in love, she resolved to divorce and marry him, the affair became public, and the two of them fled to Rome together.

The Machinery

What followed was an exercise in institutional power. Lydia's father-in-law, Federal Councillor Emil Welti, contacted the Swiss embassy in Rome. Lydia was committed to the public hospital for the insane. Stauffer was arrested and charged with kidnapping and rape.

He was released in June 1890 for insufficient evidence, but the release came too late. He suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the San Bonifazio mental hospital. He shot himself, and survived with permanently disabling injuries. He died in Florence on 24 January 1891 — some accounts give the 23rd — from an overdose of chloral hydrate, apparently in a state of paranoia.

Lydia was released in May 1890 after a psychiatric report found her mentally healthy. Her husband demanded a divorce and 1.2 million Swiss francs in compensation. Ostracised in Zürich, she founded the Gottfried Keller Foundation in the summer of 1890 with four million francs, Villa Belvoir and securities; she had intended it to promote the independence of the female sex at least in the applied arts, but her ex-husband kept that language out of the founding document. She had written a feminist tract, *Gedanken einer Frau*, while confined. It was never published. On 12 December 1891 she killed herself with household gas.

Why Karl Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on craft — specifically on the engraved line — and the sources are explicit about it. He was described as one of the most talented printmakers of his time, and the strongest assessment available holds that it is difficult to name another engraver who could equal his subtlety and mastery in depicting the human face.

What that skill consists of is worth spelling out, because engraving is unforgiving in a way painting is not. A painter can revise; an engraver cuts into metal, and every line is permanent. To model the fall of light across a cheekbone, or the slackness of an ageing eyelid, using only the density and direction of incised marks, requires the artist to have resolved the entire tonal structure of a face before touching the plate. Stauffer had done this at a professional level within a few years of first picking up the tool in 1884. Combine that with an unwillingness to flatter — the realism his own city found excessive — and you have portraits that read as forensic rather than decorous.

The counter-case is unavoidable. He was dead at thirty-three, with a working career of barely a decade, which means the body of work is small and the late development that usually settles such questions never happened. He was an outstanding practitioner of realist portraiture, not the inventor of anything. A considerable share of his fame is not artistic at all but scandalous: he is remembered as the man at the centre of one of the great Swiss establishment scandals, and that story has a gravitational pull his engravings alone might not have generated. Even his most tantalising posthumous tribute is shaky — Richard Strauss's *An Alpine Symphony* of 1915 was originally conceived as a musical portrait of Stauffer-Bern, but Strauss later denied any biographical reference. The honest formulation: extraordinary hand, curtailed career, and a legend that owes as much to what was done to him as to what he made.

What Remains

The prints remain, and the faces in them still look out with the unsettling frankness that offended Bern. Kollwitz remains, carrying forward the graphic tradition he pointed her toward. And the Gottfried Keller Foundation remains — founded by the woman the scandal destroyed, funded by the fortune that could not protect either of them, and now one of the significant patrons of art in Switzerland. It is a strange monument to a love affair that a Federal Councillor reached across a border to destroy.