THE POPULARITY OF Salomon Gessner's Idyllen (Idylls, 1756) and his Neue Idyllen (New Idylls, 1772) is astonishing. His collected works went through nine German editions over the twenty-five year period after 1762, and his works were widely translated across Europe. He achieved great popularity in France, particularly thanks to the patronage of the physiocratic thinker and politician Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, who had the first collection of Gessner's idylls published in French translation. Even leaving aside Gessner's influence as a painter and publisher, his literary legacy is one that we should take seriously.

Early critical reception was favorable too. An early review in the Zurich-based journal, the Freymüthige Nachrichten, declared that Gessner had exceeded the Ancients, while Albrecht von Haller wrote in the Göttinger Anzeigen that Gessner's idylls were better than those of Theocritus because they were more refined. Gessner's French translator concurred, arguing that he had succeeded in avoiding the rustic qualities of some ancient models and the “galanterie” of modern pastoral poetry. Gessner's representation of shepherds was praised for depicting virtuous feelings in a naive and touching manner. French and Italian pastoral poets were excoriated for representing shepherds concerned only with love, whereas Gessner was praised for the greater variety in his figures, and for the range of relationships and the manifold virtues he portrayed.

Gessner's admirers included major figures such as Diderot, Winckelmann and Rousseau. Uwe Hentschel argues that Gessner's popularity was partially a matter of good timing. His work coincided with widespread interest in agricultural reform, which took forms as varied as Johann Caspar Hirzel's portrait of the Swiss model farmer Jacob Gujer, known as Kleinjogg, and Turgot's physiocratic theories, which made agriculture central to economic policy and promised a future where nature would provide almost as abundantly as in Gessner's idylls. Gessner's readers attributed his success to the model of his Swiss homeland. More generally, the enthusiasm for Gessner's Idyllen was closely connected to the growing interest in Switzerland in the eighteenth century. Travellers’ reports suggest that they hoped to find Gessner's idylls when they visited Switzerland. Thus, in 1787, Christian Gottlieb Schmidt noted the similarity of one idyll to Gessner's country house in the Sihlwald, whilst in 1775 Madame de Genlis reported her disappointment at the mismatch between her expectations and the reality of Gessner's home.