Birth may be an obvious place to begin the story of a life, but it is admirably finite; so we shall begin there. Othmar Schoeck was born in Brunnen in Canton Schwyz, in a villa overlooking Lake Lucerne, on 1 September 1886. The fact that the place of his birth is one of the most picturesque in Switzerland was no mere happenstance, for his father, an artist, had gone there in order to paint its landscapes. This Alfred Schoeck (1841–1931) was the only surviving child of a rich silk merchant from the city of Basel. His family, originally from the area around Heilbronn in southern Germany, had arrived there via France, where until the revolution a surgeon-Schoeck had been personal physician to the unlucky Princesse de Lamballe. Alfred had not inherited his family's business leanings, his ambitions being instead centered on the visual arts. This artistic streak was paired with a wanderlust such as one finds celebrated in the writings of the early German Romantics. So Alfred studied painting with Friedrich Horner and François Diday and thereafter spent a goodly portion of his considerable inheritance in traveling the northern hemisphere, hunting and painting. Photographs of him sitting at an easel, surrounded by trees and his own artwork, survive as testament to his exploits in Canada, the Lofoten islands, and the Dobruja.