Anton Keller (painter)

Joseph Maria Anton Keller (born May 28, 1775 in Pfronten ; † in the 19th century) was a German painter who was mainly active in Croatia . He belonged to the Pfronten artist family Keller. His oeuvre may have been very extensive, but only parts of it have been preserved and researched.

Life

Anton Keller was the second son of the Pfronten baroque painter Joseph Keller and his wife Anastasia, nee. Kloeck. Like his younger brother Alois , he was initially trained by his father and studied at the Vienna Art Academy from 1798 . At the time of his studies he lived in Vienna at Leopoldgasse 156 near the Blauer Schiff. Then he reached over the Styria to Varazdin and Zagreb . He presumably had a workshop there, which should explain the different quality and subject matter of the works signed with his name. Records have survived, according to which the city council of Varaždin discussed on January 10, 1801 Keller's request to be allowed to stay in this city. At that time, Keller was unable to submit any documents about his origin because Augsburg , which he stated as his place of birth in contradiction to the Pfronten documents, was occupied. The request was initially granted, but with the condition that Keller submitted the relevant documents. In the summer of the same year a letter from Joseph Keller arrived in Varaždin, which included, among other things, Keller's baptismal certificate. After Anton Keller's legal situation had been settled in this way, he married Mariana Smik, daughter of a Joseph Smik from Styria, on January 18, 1802, in the parish church of St. Nicholas in Varaždin.

In 1805 he was the tenant of the tailor Leopold Thonhauser in Varaždin. In 1807 he was commissioned to paint street signs and house numbers for Varaždin. At the beginning of 1811 he divorced his wife and was obliged to make maintenance payments of 15 forints per month. In return, Mariana Keller was obliged not to cause any problems for the "housekeeper" of her ex-husband and the children who came from Keller's relationship with this woman for a year and to behave in a friendly manner towards them. The city council, which discussed the matter on March 8, 1811, saw the incident as a scandal and decided to remove Keller's lover from the city within three days and to force Keller to continue living with Mariana. It is possible that he then left the city, at least there are no further documents about Keller's stay in Varaždin and his activities seem to have shifted to Zagreb in the 1820s.

In 1816 he was supposed to start teaching a student, Vinko Wallenek . He painted altarpieces for the former monastery church in Remete in the 1820s . When and where Anton Keller died is not known.

Works

In the tradition of his family, Anton Keller created late baroque frescoes , oil paintings of religious content and portraits. Ivan Kukuljević Sakcinski , who included Keller in his Lexicon of South Slavic Artists, published in 1858, only listed Keller's religious paintings. He mentioned frescoes with two scenes from the life of St. Maximilian in the corresponding chapel of the former Pauline monastery church in Remete, which were built in 1812/13 and destroyed by an earthquake in 1880, a fresco of the Holy Trinity in the castle chapel of Lobor in Zagorje and various altarpieces. The painting with St. Barbara in the parish church of St. Magdalena in Kneginec was created in 1811, and in 1815 Keller painted St. Anthony of Padua for the parish church of St. Markus in Vinica . From the proximity of these churches to Zagreb and the significance of Zagreb as the capital of Kroaktion at the time, Kukuljević Sakcinski concluded that Keller was based in Zagreb, which Tanja Zimmermann describes as an error. A depiction of St. John Nepomuk in the Diocesan Museum in Zagreb dates from 1820 . In 1826 Keller painted three altarpieces for the St. George cemetery chapel in Zagreb: a St. George fighting the dragon, a Mary with the child and another picture that has been lost since the Second World War . Also known are two depictions of Joseph with the baby Jesus , one of which is in Podvorec , the other in the parish church of Kneginec. The latter dates from 1811, the Podvorec version from 1810.

Portrait of Josip Herović

In 1802, Keller painted portraits of a middle-class couple. You are in the State Museum of Maribor . In 1804 he portrayed the merchant Vincenz Gortan and his wife. These pictures are in the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb. Another portrait created by Keller shows the teacher Josip Herović and is kept in the Samobor Museum. There are other portraits in the Croatian Historical Museum in Zagreb that are unsigned but can be ascribed to Keller with some certainty.

While she does not regard Keller's religious works as too significant and not necessarily all of them as authentic, Tanja Zimmermann attaches a certain importance to the portraits: Keller was “one of the first bourgeois portrait painters in Croatia and one of the preparers of the Biedermeier period , which two decades later became Croatia conquered [...] The aesthetic quality of the most beautiful portraits lies in their unrhetorical immediacy, which creates space for a timeless type of psychology precisely by reducing the representation to the reproduction of the appearance. In Keller's characterful portraits, even if they are tied to a simple type, a self-affirming provincial bourgeoisie comes before our eyes, even before it could achieve a significant role in the history of Croatia [...] Keller's portraits are serious testimonies to one of the history of Croatia [ ...] significant historical period. "

literature

• Tanja Zimmermann, Anton Keller in Croatia. Neighboring church painting and early bourgeois portrait art , in: Andreas Tacke (ed.): Autumn of the Baroque. The Keller family. Munich / Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-422-06229-7 , pp. 503-512

Individual evidence

1. ^ Tanja Zimmermann, Anton Keller in Croatia. Neighboring church painting and early bourgeois portrait art , in: Andreas Tacke (ed.): Autumn of the Baroque. The Keller family. Munich / Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-422-06229-7 , pp. 503-512, here p. 503 f.
2. ^ Tanja Zimmermann, Anton Keller in Croatia. Neighboring church painting and early bourgeois portrait art , in: Andreas Tacke (ed.): Autumn of the Baroque. The Keller family. Munich / Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-422-06229-7 , pp. 503-512, here p. 504
3. ^ Tanja Zimmermann, Anton Keller in Croatia. Neighboring church painting and early bourgeois portrait art , in: Andreas Tacke (ed.): Autumn of the Baroque. The Keller family. Munich / Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-422-06229-7 , pp. 503-512, here pp. 507 f.