 Although his natural preference lay with watercolour, often with gouache and pen and ink, several works in oil survive.William Geissler was the grandson of Paul Richard Geissler, who in the 1850s had emigrated from Hirschfeld, Saxony in Germany to Edinburgh, where he settled and married, pursuing a career as a music teacher for children of well-to-do families.Following the collapse of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878, the financial conditions of Paul Richard's clients, as well as his own, became severely strained.