He was a brilliant portraitist and successful painter, a masterful woodcut artist, a teacher who was both empathetic and didactically gifted, an analytically minded individual and sharp-tongued rhetorician, a socially engaged networker, a loyal friend, and a caring father and husband. He was considered humorous, literarily interested, and always an engaging conversational partner on intellectual matters. Ernst Würtenberger, born in 1868 in Steisslingen, southern Baden, was German by birth but grew up in Emmishofen, now Kreuzlingen, from the age of eight and spent his most important artistic years in Zurich between 1902 and 1921. Here, he not only built a career as a portraitist but also became involved in the local art scene: for many years, he was a member of the collection and exhibition commission of Zurich.