Rudolf Koller (1828 - 1905). Rudolf Koller 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. Koller was born in Zürich in 1828. In 1830 his father, Johann Heinrich, was a butcher and brewer, who became the innkeeper at the Schwarzen Adler hotel, in the centre of the city near the river. His mother was Maria Ursula née Forster. As the clientele were mostly waggoners and cattle dealers, Koller saw horses and cattle on a daily basis. He started his education at a private school; later he attended an elementary school called Fraumünster. From 1840 to 1843 he studied at the cantonal industrial school in Zürich. He got his first artistic tuition from his uncle, who was a landscape painter. The young Koller decided to specialise as a painter in depicting horses. After he left the Industrial School in Zurich, in October 1843, Koller began studying under the art teacher Jacques Schweizer, the portrait painter Johann Rudolf Obrist, and the landscape painter Johann Jakob Ulrich, and took private painting classes with them. Ulrich, who was a successful painter of landscapes and animals, influenced him further in his choice of themes during his artistic career. In 1845 he went to Munich where he worked with a group of artists called the Schweizer, led by the Swiss landscapist Johann Gottfried Steffan. In 1845 horse trials were begun at the stud farm of the King of Württemberg, near Stuttgart, and Koller was hired to produce pictures of horses and dogs there. In 1846-47, he studied figure drawing under Karl Ferdinand Sohn at the Fine Arts Academy of Düsseldorf. At the Academy Koller formed friendships with the future Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin and the German classicist Anselm Feuerbach.Rudolf Koller travelled together with his friend Arnold Böcklin to Brussels and Antwerp, in 1847. Later Koller moved to Paris. In 1847, while living in Paris, he shared a studio with Arnold Böcklin. At the Louvre he copied Netherlandish artworks of the 17th century and familiarized himself with the works of contemporary animal painters such as Rosa Bonheur and Constant Troyon.