Adolf von Beckerath

Franz Adolf von Beckerath (born August 17, 1834 in Cracau (Krefeld) , † December 28, 1915 in Berlin ) was a German art collector.

Life

The youngest member of an important family of textile manufacturers in Krefeld became a silk merchant himself and moved to Berlin in the early 1850s . The Berliner by choice was considered a friend of Italy, music lover and promoter and one of the best connoisseurs of the art of the Italian Renaissance . Early on he began to collect according to plan: works of sculpture and applied arts of the Italian early Renaissance , as well as paintings and, to a large extent, drawings by old masters. Soon his collecting enthusiasm extended to the Dutch of the 17th century.

Among the Wilhelminian style collections of ancient art in German-speaking countries, his collection can only be compared with that of Adalbert von Lana . To name just a few names that can be found in the Beckerath collection: Stefano da Verona , Filippo Lippi , Botticelli , Michelangelo , Tizian , Dürer , Rubens , Van Dyck , Rembrandt , François Boucher . Contemporaries like Friedländer and Bode, who were able to judge it, attested Beckerath “a sense of art and historical understanding”.

Beckerath's collection of drawings alone comprised 3456 works, which he made available to the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett in return for an annuity . To commemorate the acquisition of the collection 100 years earlier, an exhibition with the master drawings from the Adolf von Beckerath collection took place from November 30, 2002 to March 2, 2003 in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

literature

• Sven Kuhrau: The art collector in the empire. Art and representation in Berlin's private collector culture. Ludwig, Kiel 2005. ISBN 3-937719-20-2 .

Web links

• Family website