Name: Coastal Landscape
Artist : Theo Meier
Technique : Oil On Canvas
Year : N.d.
Size : 53 x 65.5cm

Inspired by the works of Paul Gaugain and Jean Jacques Rousseau, Theodor Wilhelm Meier (Theo Meier) left his native country of Switzerland in 1931 to search for that multi-textured landscape and never looked back.

Theo Meier was born in the Budendorf/Basel-Campagne in 1908. It was a great period of social revolutions where new sub-types of art emerged such as Cubism and Futurism. It is to no surprise therefore that young Theo would harbour strong desires in becoming an artist during this exciting time of Modern Art. He eventually enrolled at the Basel School of Arts and Craft and completed short courses in Berlin and Dresden.

Theo Meier never gave up on his dream of visiting the places that Gaugain found his supposed ‘enlightenment’. When Meier finally arrived in Tahiti against his family’s wishes, the young aspiring painter was disappointed by the reality of the island. He quickly realises that Gaugain manufactured an exaggerated “primitivism” image as created in his paintings and diary. Meier then so moved along to search for his own adventure.

He writes: “I became aware after my return of something new in Basle–how a community cultivated the arts within its walls. Splendid concerts were to be heard, and the city created an Arts Fund for paintings, mosaics, and sculptures in squares and on walls wherever it was appropriate. A painter was something of a cultural phenomenon–and there were many of them. That was not what I was looking for. I had in mind a country in which the painter lived, as one might say, unobserved but belonged in his activity to the whole. Perhaps I had also hoped to find a country where the painter was shaped by the power of its culture.”

In 1936, Meier finally arrived in Bali and would settle there for the next 20 years. The painter seemed to have finally found what he was yearning for at Sanur, south of Bali where he first resided. He found fortune in selling his works to important people of Indonesia and eventually made his way to Thailand in 1957 on the invitation of his friend Prince Sanidh Rangsit. 

In Chiangmai, Meier settled in with an iconic teak house that still stands today. He would spend the rest of his years painting and sketching from his riverside property, giving us a glimpse into scenes from the mighty river Ping as told through the eyes of a natural-born romantic.

Meier would succumb to cancer in 1982 and passed away back in his birth home, Switzerland.