Anton Josef Dräger

Anton Josef Dräger

Anton Josef Dräger (born September 9, 1794 in Münstermaifeld , † July 26, 1833 in Rome ) was a German painter .

Life

He was the son of Martin Dräger , aldermen in Münstermaifeld and administrator of what was then the Heilig-Geist-Hospital , and Anna Katharina Vacano . His grandfather was the university professor in Trier and alderman Nikolaus Josef Dräger .

From 1817 Dräger studied at the Dresden Art Academy under Gerhard von Kügelgen . Four years later (1821) he went to Rome with other German painters (including Carl Götzloff , Carl Georg Schumacher and Dietrich Wilhelm Lindau ), which he reached on October 25th. He lived and worked there until his untimely death when he was less than 39 years old. In Rome he became known as a co-founder of the Ponte Molle Society , the forerunner of the German Artists' Association from 1845.

Dräger was friends with the painter Erwin Speckter (1806–1835), he was also known in Rome with Carl Gottlieb Peschel . The Prussian envoy Christian Karl Josias Freiherr von Bunsen was one of his friends, as was the head of the royal Hanoverian embassy and art collector August Kestner .

Works

St. Cecilia

Dräger based himself on Goethe's theory of colors and began his experiments with gray backgrounds. In his works he took the Dutch and Venetians as artistic models and was praised by his colleagues for his “talent for color” . Among the Germans in Rome, Dräger was the first artist to turn to the “painterly” that began around this time with an emphasis on colorism. That's why Dräger more or less sacrificed everything for color.

Today, Dräger's paintings are in well-known museums, e.g. B. in Copenhagen , Rome, Berlin , Dresden , Hanover and Trier . These include, among others

• 1822: St. Cäcilie , State Palaces and Gardens of Hesse - Weilburg Castle Museum
• 1824: Rahel and Jacob at the fountain ( illustration ), City Museum Simeonstift Trier
• 1828: Moses at the well
• Christ's Entombment ( illustration )
• Male body ( illustration )

literature

• Philipp Laven: biography of the painter JA Dräger . In: Treviris 2nd year (1835), issue 5 - 8, without pagination
• Walter Dieck: A picture by the Trier painter Anton Josef Dräger . In: Saarbrücker Hefte . Issue 10/1959, pages 51–59
• E. Nick: The painter Anton Joseph Dräger . In: Trier magazine . Volume 7/1932, pages 99-115
• Dieter Ahrens: Ramboux and Dräger in Italy . In: Spaces of History. German-Roman from the 18th to the 20th century . German Historians' Day Trier 1986, Spee-Verlag, Trier 1986

Web links

Commons : Anton Josef Dräger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wolfgang Laufer: The social structure of the city of Trier in the early modern period , 1973, page 279 ( excerpt )
2. ^ The statements in the literature differ as to whether Dräger went to Rome in 1820 or in 1821; What is certain is that he set out in July and arrived on October 25th.
3. ↑ Thorsten Albrecht: Born to see. Hand drawings from the Goethe era and the 19th century , Museum for Art and Cultural History of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck (ed.), 2007, page 45 ( excerpt )
4. ↑ Werner Busch, Elisabeth Müller-Luckner: Refined seeing. Optics and color in the 18th and early 19th centuries , 2008, page 36 ( excerpt )
5. ↑ Annik Pietsch: Color theory and painting practice around 1800. The manual production of the artistic coloring according to the "laws of aesthetics and physics" , in: Werner Busch, Elisabeth Müller-Luckner (ed.): Refined seeing. Optics and color in the 18th and early 19th centuries , Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2008, page 37 ( excerpt )
6. ^ Yearbook of the Hamburger Kunstsammlungen , Hamburger Kunsthalle and Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (ed.), Volume 14–15, 1970, page 185 ( excerpt )
7. ^ Karl Koetschau: Rhenish painting in the Biedermeier period , 1926, page 27 ( excerpt )