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Adrian Zingg, born in St. Gallen in 1734 and raised there, studied with Johann Ludwig Aberli in Bern and with Johann Georg Wille in Paris. In 1766, he came to Dresden. Together with his Swiss fellow, the portrait painter Anton Graff, he discovered and hiked in the Saxon and Bohemian landscape. Even today, his indexing of the site is known to have motivated the naming of the Saxon Switzerland. Zingg was running a very successful workshop in Dresden. Being a teacher for etching at the local art academy, he influenced an entire generation of landscape artists in Dresden. Furthermore, Zingg’s aftermath on the depiction of topographical landscape extended far from his death in 1816. Caspar David Friedrich was his most important heir and, at the same time, he overcame his idea of landscape depiction in the spirit of Enlightenment and Classicism.