Alexius Geyer

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Fedor Alexius Geyer (born May 25, 1816 in Berlin ; † July 16, 1883 there ) was a German landscape and oriental painter .

life and work

Turkish cemetery

Geyer attended the academies in Berlin , Munich and Dresden . After graduating, he went abroad for a total of ten years in 1840.

First he spent a few years in Rome (1841–1847) and Italy. In Rome he was president of the Ponte Molle Society from 1842–43 and a founding member of the subsequent German Artists' Association in 1845 ; During his time in Rome he also made several visits to Naples and Sicily (most recently in 1847). Finally, at the instigation of King Otto of Greece , he went on a hike through Greece (autumn 1847) and many parts of the Orient . He visited Palestine, Asia Minor, Armenia and the Danube countries. In autumn 1848 at the latest (and perhaps even earlier) he was in Constantinople , where he also stayed for a long time, probably until the second half of 1849. There he also saw the reopening of the opera house in Pera in November 1848. Gaspare Fossati , the Between 1847 and 1849, he was in charge of the restoration of Hagia Sophia on behalf of the Sultan , Geyer employed over six months as a draftsman and copyist of the wall frescoes. In 1850, Geyer undertook a trip on the Nile together with the Bernese architect Theodor Zeerleder before he returned to Berlin in September 1850 in the company of the Orient and genre painter Leopold Güterbock . Geyer also toured a large part of Germany, Switzerland , Belgium and Holland .

Geyer first showed pictures that were brought back or inspired by his travels in 1852 at the Berlin Academy of the Arts , then in the following year at exhibitions in Stettin and Breslau. From 1854 he exhibited regularly in Berlin, in particular at the Royal Prussian Academy of the Arts, and the Berlin art exhibition in 1854 was a first respectable success for him. During all his travels he made numerous studies and sketches that he used as a template for his later works. The themes of his paintings were mainly dramatic landscapes and genre scenes of rural life, with oriental motifs being particularly common: the titles of his paintings are e.g. B. “A Turkish churchyard in Batum”, “A Turkish mill”, “Acropolis of Athens”, “View of Constantinople” or “Arab village on the Nile”. He created a larger series of ten works for King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, others for the Archaeological Museum in Rome, for the “Book of Art” and some cycloramas from the Bosporus and the Nile .

In 1859 Geyer self-published twelve landscape studies, designed and drawn on stone , which could also be obtained individually, via his private address: Alexandrinen-Straße 31 in Berlin. According to a reviewer in Die Dioskuren. Journal for Art, the Art Industry and Artistic Life (published by Max Schasler in Berlin), these studies were particularly suitable as “template sheets for landscape drawing” and especially “for higher drawing lessons in schools”. The motifs of the individual leaves were bushes (elderberry bush, linden bush), vine leaves and trees (beeches, palms, willows, chestnuts, etc.).

His students in Berlin included u. a. the Berlin landscape painter Max Fritz . Geyer's estate - allegedly no fewer than 350 paintings - was auctioned in Berlin in November 1892, almost ten years after his death.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Trinity Church baptismal register, No. 186/1816.
  2. ↑ Death Register StA Berlin XII, No. 2244/1883.
  3. ↑ See: Breslau (art exhibition) . In: Feuilleton for the newspaper for the elegant world . No. 31 , 1853, pp. 372 .
  4. ^ Twelve landscape studies by Alexius Geyer (review or advertisement) . In: The Dioscuri . tape IV , no. 49-50 . Berlin January 15, 1859, p. 10 .
personal data
SURNAME Geyer, Alexius
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Geyer, Fedor Alexius (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German landscape painter
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1816
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH July 16, 1883
Place of death Berlin