Paul Zeiller

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Paul Zeiller (1658–1738) was an Austrian Baroque painter. From 1692, he ran a workshop in Reutte that later became an art school. His son Johann Jakob Zeiller and his adopted son Franz Anton Zeiller learned there.

He originally planned to become a clergyman, but around 1675 he went to Florence as a tutor at the Medici court and met the court painter Livio Mehus, who sparked his interest in art. After some early success, he left the court to devote himself to painting and worked with Mehus for several years. Some sources say he lived in Rome for sixteen years, and he may have trained in Augsburg in 1682 with Johann Georg Knappich. He did settle in Rome for a time, but in 1692 he returned to Reutte to visit his sick mother. There he met Regina Jäger and married her a week after his mother’s death. By September he decided to stay in Reutte. Regina died in 1698 after the birth of their third child, and Zeiller remarried soon after. In 1699 his new wife Anna gave birth to a daughter who would become the wife of painter Balthasar Riepp.

There was a report that he was named court painter for the Habsburgs through a brother’s influence, but this cannot be confirmed. He became the Mayor of Reutte in 1710 and served in that role conscientiously. Zeiller focused mainly on panel painting; his only known ceiling fresco, in the Church of the Resurrection in Breitenwang, is also done in panels. He later founded a well-attended panel painting school at his workshop, which his son-in-law Riepp continued after Zeiller’s death.

Although he was prolific, all of his works created before 1695 are lost, and only a few remain in their original locations. His surviving oil paintings are in the Chapter Hall at St. Mang’s Abbey, Füssen. Paul Zeiller died on 19 August 1738 in Reutte.