Gessner

Gessner, SALOMON, a German pastoral poet, who also painted and engraved landscapes, was born at Zurich, 1st April 1730. His life was spent as a bookseller in his native town, where he died, 2d March 1788. In 1754 he published Daphnis, a conventional bucolic, sentimental, sweetly insipid, lifeless, and unreal. This was followed two years later by a volume of Idyls and by Inkel und Yariko. His Tod Abels (the Death of Abel), a species of idyllic heroic prose poem, which was published in 1758, although the feeblest of his works, had the greatest success, and helped to make its author's name known throughout Europe. Gessner's landscape-paintings are all in the conventional classic style. But his engravings are of real merit; some of them are said to be worthy of the first masters. In 1772 he published a second volume of Idyls, and a series of letters on landscape-painting.