Töpffer, RODOLPHE, artist and novelist, was born the son of a painter at Geneva, January 31, 1799, and himself studied art, but was obliged by the weakness of his eyes to become a teacher. He founded a boarding-school in 1825, and conducted it till his death, was named in 1832 professor of Rhetoric at the Geneva Academy, and died 8th June 1846. His name is widely known from the delightful Nouvelles Génévaises (1841), and from the exquisite little masterpiece of sentiment and fancy, La Bibliothèque de mon Oncle (1832). Other novels are Le Presbytère (1833) and his last and unfinished work, Rosa et Gertrude (1846). Töpffer had a genius for humorous caricature, and the drawings in his two series of Voyages en Zig-zag (1843-53) are almost better than the text.
See the Lives by Relave (1886), and Blondel and Mirabaud (1887); also Rambert, Écrivains nationaux Suisses (vol. i. Geneva, 1874). See Sainte-Beuve, Portraits Littéraires, vol. iii., and Portr. Contemporains, vol. iii.