Carl Uhde

Carl A. Uhde

Carl Adolf Uhde (born February 2, 1792 in Brandenburg ; † November 17, 1856 Handschuhsheim ) was a German merchant and South America collector.

family

He came from an old merchant family. This was originally located in Gardelegen in the Altmark, where Ciriacus and Henning Uden can be traced in 1393, the brothers Niclas and Ciriacus in 1419 and Mayor Udo Udonis in 1493. In 1552 the family was recorded in Egeln near Magdeburg . The secured family line begins with Christian Röttger Heinrich Uhde , a merchant in Egeln, who married Dorothea Rulmann there on June 6, 1608 .

Uhde was the eldest son of Friedrich Ludwig Uhde (1763–1809), the first Lord Mayor of Brandenburg , and Caroline Fischer. His younger brother Friedrich Gustav Uhde (1794-1814) was a merchant in Hamburg , and his sister was married to a consul Eschenburg in Buenos Aires .

Uhde married Eliza Hinrichs in London around 1813. They had five children: Karl (Charles) (February 7, 1814 - 1859), Albertina Eliza (December 3, 1817 - January 12, 1856, great-grandmother of Claus von Stauffenberg ), Emma Caroline (born June 22, 1821, great-grandmother of Peter Yorck von Wartenburg ), Adolf Wilhelm Bernhard (* 1822) and Albert Rodney (* 1836).

Life

Uhde spent his childhood in Alt Brandenburg an der Havel, where he probably went to school. The French were in the city from 1806 to 1808. In 1809, at the age of 17, he lost his father. While his younger brother began his commercial activity in Hamburg in 1814, he was established as a German businessman in London . His first four children were born there.

This was followed by a 13-year business stay in Mexico from 1823 to 1835. During this time, he developed an intensive collecting activity that was not only directed towards archaeological finds, but also minerals , plants and books.

The youngest son was born in Stuttgart in 1836 , from where Uhde acquired the small castle in Handschuhsheim that same year , an estate from the 18th century. He built an outbuilding connected to the palace by a pergola as a museum for the collections he had acquired in Central and South America.

“The collection was 'incomparable richness'. The works of Indian sculpture were particularly impressive: Figures of the Aztec gods, mostly made of volcanic rock, and other testimonies from the Aztec empire that was once established in the highlands of Mexico and that was destroyed by the Spanish conquerors between 1519 and 1521. There was also an abundance of other exhibits: idols made of baked clay, a huge rattlesnake made of granite, a multitude of faces carved from stone, jewelry, stones, pearls made of pure gold, pottery, swords, arrowheads, knives made of obsidian, axes made of copper and stone and more. In addition to these 'old treasures', Uhde also owned a collection of Mexican natural products: stuffed animals, over 500 different species of birds, insects from all classes, a herbarium and finally a rich mineral exhibition. Well-known scientists, including historians and archaeologists, botanists, zoologists and mineralogists, found their way to Handschuhsheim in the years that followed to see the collections that Uhde 'showed the visitors with courteous kindness and instruction'. "

The family frequented the highest social circles. Albertina married Count Rudolf von Üxküll -Gyllenband (* May 16, 1809; † December 12, 1879) and Emma married Count Otto Eckbrecht von Dürkheim-Montmartin (* July 23, 1804). The resistance fighters Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg , who are often referred to as cousins ​​in literature, were related to each other through the two Uhde sisters, their great-grandmothers . Uhde's eldest son Charles married Olympia Cockburn-Campbell in 1857, the daughter of Baronet Alexander Thomas Cockburn-Campbell. Charles Uhde inherited the castle after his father's death in 1856. After his death in 1859 it fell to his younger brother Adolph Uhde. He was a merchant in Matamarus (Mexico) and at that time lived in Handschuhsheim. On May 1, 1861, he sold the castle with accessories for 35,000 guilders to the Australian "King of Mines" John Benjamin Graham, but without the collection. For the latter, December 14, 1861 was set as the auction day.

The director of the Royal Prussian Art Chamber in Berlin, Leopold von Ledebur , arrived in time and viewed the estate, the so-called Uhde collection in Handschuhsheim. The Royal Prussian Museum in Berlin was awarded the bid for 18,000 guilders.

The extensive collection was divided. The books went to the Royal and Museum Library in Berlin, the University Library of Bonn , Breslau and Koenigsberg and to the Germanic Museum in Nuremberg ( Germanic National Museum ); the zoological collection to the Zoological and Anatomical Museum Berlin , the zoological museum in Breslau, Bonn , Halle , Königsberg and to the royal secondary school (location?); the botanical collections to the herbarium in Berlin and Halle; the minerals and fossils to the mineral cabinet in Berlin, Breslau, Königsberg, Halle, Greifswald , Bonn, Münster ; the coins were transferred to the Royal Münzcabinet ( Münzkabinett Berlin ).

The archaeological pieces were acquired and entered in the entry book of the Royal Prussian Art Chamber in Berlin on August 6, 1870. The collection comprised over 4000 objects, mostly Mexican, which are now in the Archaeological Collection of the Ethnological Museum Berlin .

Footnotes

1. ↑ German Gender Book , Volume 128, Page 354
2. ↑ His second son describes him in his marriage protocol in Hamburg in 1818 as Lord Mayor (see von Marchthaler), while in Gustav Uhde's "Gender Register of Uden or Uhden" from 1855 he is only listed as "Mayor". Possibly he held both offices in 1809.
3. ↑ Eberhard Schöll
4. ↑ Rudolf von Üxküll-Gyllenband at geneall.net
5. ↑ Otto Eckbrecht from Dürkheim-Montmartin at geneall.net

literature

• Archive material in the Ethnological Museum Berlin: I / MV 0418 (IB 088 Asia, 1910–1934) Alb. Uhde, Lichtenthal (Ludwigsbad), letter dated September 25, 1892 to Adolf Bastian (?), Request about the whereabouts of the grandfather's collection. - Answer of the Museum für Völkerkunde of October 3, 1892 with a list of the whereabouts of the collection.
• Martin Jordan : Die Handschuhsheimer vor 1900, Ortssippenbuch Heidelberg-Handschuhsheim, Verlag Brigitte Guderjahn, Heidelberg 1988, p. 464.
• Hildegard von Marchthaler : "Material collection on many families from Hamburg and the Hamburg area", folder St-Z, No. 93.30.06, estate in the archive of the Genealogical Society Hamburg e. V., Alsterchaussee 11, 20149 Hamburg.
• Eberhard Schöll : Mexico - Handschuhsheim - Berlin, In the footsteps of Karl Adolf Uhde's collection "Mexican antiquities and natural objects" , in: Yearbook 1999 District Association Handschuhsheim e. V., p. 25f.
• Gustav Uhde : "Gender Register of the Uden or Uhden", Breslau 1855.

Web links

• Mexico and Mesoamerica in the German-speaking area (16th – 19th centuries), bibliography catalog under construction at the University of Vienna
• UHDEN family also UHDE originally written from Gardelegen in the Altmark