Carl Theodor Reiffenstein
Carl Theodor Reiffenstein (* 12. January 1820 in Frankfurt am Main , † 6. December 1893 ) was a German architectural and landscape painter of romanticism . His records and pictures are by far the most valuable source for life in Frankfurt's old town in the 19th century and the changes that have occurred since then.
Life
Carl Theodor Reiffenstein came from a family that can be traced back to Frankfurt am Main in 1582. His parents were the brewer Johann Gerhard Reiffenstein (1774–1843) and his wife Anna Maria, née Hoffmann (1782–1847). His parents' house was Graubengasse 18 , called Kommelbecher , which was almost exactly in the middle of the area of Frankfurt's old town that was destroyed in the Great Christian Fire in 1719 and rebuilt shortly afterwards . Even his childhood and youth - he himself stated that he lived in his parents' house up to the age of 23 - Reiffenstein almost exclusively spent in this part of the city, which at that time was still medieval .
His father, who ran an inn , wanted his son to be his successor. However, he showed an early interest in artistic training and had his first drawing lessons at a young age with the decorative and carpentry painter Falk from Lübeck , who temporarily lived in his parents' house. In 1828 he made his first trip with the young Reiffenstein, which led over the Main to Höchst , from here via Hofheim and Lorsbach to Eppstein , and according to his memoirs, “perhaps more than anything else gave him the impetus to paint”.
After attending primary school for two years in house Zeil 25, at the age of about seven he went to the "Weißfrauenschule", which was then housed in the rooms of the former Weißfrauenkloster, which was demolished in 1912 , and then to the "Katharinenschule" in the "Alte Rothofstraße" . According to autobiographical records, his painting skills were already sufficiently advanced at that time, around 1830, that he could hand- color engravings and lithographs for a graphic dealer for money. He also formed both self-taught from books and the theater painter pile on. After his death he learned from his successor Hoffmann, a student at the Munich Academy , about whom he wrote that he owed a “large part” of his “practical training”, especially in geometry , perspective and optics .
At the age of thirteen Reiffenstein left school prematurely with his father's permission and enrolled in the Städelschule under Friedrich Maximilian Hessemer , initially with the aim of becoming an architect . Hessemer was officially active as a professor of architecture in Frankfurt, but in the three decades of his teaching activity (1830–1860) he also created countless architectural drawings, which may have had a strong influence on Reiffenstein's later inclinations. It was only with the persuasion of his former teacher Hoffmann and Heinrich von Rustige , who also worked at the Städel, that he switched to painting in 1843/1844. Under Jakob Becker , in anatomy also under Eduard Schmidt von der Launitz , he became a classmate of Anton Burger and Philipp Rumpf, among others .
Already during his apprenticeship years Reiffenstein collected motifs abroad, for example in 1839 in the Odenwald and in 1843 in the Taunus and on the Lahn . When he left the institute in 1846, extended study trips followed, which initially took him to Brussels and Paris . 1848–1852 visits to the Harz Mountains , the Giant Mountains , Bohemia , Switzerland and Italy followed .
He was soon able to celebrate successes that enabled him to make a living as a painter. In 1845 he was awarded a medal at the world exhibition in Brussels, and in 1858 the “Cercle artistique” in Ghent appointed him a corresponding member. In 1873 he received the medal for art again at the world exhibition in Vienna . Atmospheric landscapes earned him the nickname of a "painting poet". Reiffenstein received commissions mainly from art lovers from all over the Rhine-Main area , but also from abroad: in 1857 he created a series of 17 watercolors from the interior and the vicinity of Waldleiningen Castle and from Amorbach for Queen Victoria of England in memory her stepbrother, Prince Karl von Leiningen .
For many years Reiffenstein was a board member of the "Association for History and Archeology" in his hometown. His dedication to the Goethe House should be emphasized : he not only designed the brand of the Free German Hochstift , which has not changed to this day , and which acquired the house in 1863, he also volunteered as treasurer for donations and contributions to its restoration. Contemporaries characterized Reiffenstein as friendly, always helpful, educated, but conservative in every respect. As a practicing violinist, he always preferred the "old masters", but strictly rejected Wagner and Chopin .
He later married Karoline Natalie Mannskopf in 1867, who came from an important old Frankfurt family of wine merchants . His wife always helped him with his work in the more than 25 years of marriage, especially cataloging his very fruitful work. The marriage remained childless. After the death of his wife on March 11, 1892, Reiffenstein suffered a minor stroke that paralyzed the right half of the body. After a slight improvement, he contracted a shrinkage of the kidneys , to which an influenza was added. He died on December 6, 1893 and was buried in Frankfurt's main cemetery, the grave is in Gewann G 372. In his memory, a square in downtown Frankfurt is named after him.
plant
The oeuvre of Reiffenstein is almost unmanageable, mainly due to the wide distribution in private ownership, he certainly created well over 2,000 watercolors, drawings and also some oil paintings ; a school friend of Reiffenstein's, later city councilor Gottfried Beck, spoke, including the equally abundant study sheets and sketches, even of 10,000 works. In addition to countless private owners, they are now in the Frankfurt Historical Museum and the Städel Art Institute (the latter, in addition to numerous works, alone 43 volumes of studies). In addition to some landscape and nature scenes with a focus on Hesse , a few inspired by his trips abroad or enriched with elements of genre painting , his work had one central subject : the documentation of a world threatened by change.
(watercolor)
At the beginning of Reiffenstein's artistic work, Frankfurt am Main was just on the threshold of a turning point. The city expanded into the new city quarters outside the medieval city walls, while many traditional monuments disappeared in the old town. Reiffenstein not only regretted the loss of these "true beauties", but also observed how much the habits and customs of the residents changed as a result: around 1830 the houses in the old town were given water pipes, and cattle were banned for hygienic reasons in the narrow old town to hold and slaughter. He perceived these changes as a loss of the simplicity and naturalness of city life.
Similar to the photographer Carl Friedrich Mylius , who worked from around the mid-1850s , he tirelessly drew the old alleys, squares, fountains, gates and town houses, often only days before they had to give way to new buildings and street openings. In later works it is noticeable that he likes to reproduce the street scenes according to his ideal, i.e. especially in the state of the years of his childhood in the 1820s and 1830s. Where conversions had already destroyed historical buildings, he resorted to all sources available to him in order to visually reconstruct them in their “original state”, some of which were centuries ago. From today's perspective, this was often, but not always, of high documentary value, as it was not infrequently possible to rely on eyewitness reports from older citizens or images that are no longer available today.
It is noteworthy that he left no depictions of Frankfurt's large squares or the celebrated new buildings such as the reconstructed cathedral or the opera house . He showed the former - consistently following his aforementioned ideals - even in his later work in the state in which the Middle Ages had left him with an unfinished dome, for example on one of his last oil paintings from 1881, in which the view from the city forest to the in the distance towering church is directed.
Reiffenstein bequeathed a topographically structured work of seven volumes, the “Collection of Frankfurter Views”, with 1,692 images and 2,600 pages of extensive notes on details, owners, presumed age and changes to buildings in the entire old town against payment of one of his primary work lifelong annuity in 1876 to the Frankfurt Historical Museum. To date it has not been fully published, but has already served as the basis for dozens of publications about Frankfurt. In addition, he also left historicizing illustrations , for example in the pictures of Goethe's Poetry and Truth .
Stylistically, Reiffenstein's early independent work shows the influence of the Düsseldorf Romantic School of Painting , especially Carl Friedrich Lessing and Alfred Rethel , who both worked in Frankfurt in the 1830s (including the pictures of the Roman Imperial Hall ). The fact that his teachers at the Städel were either trained there ( Jakob Becker , Heinrich von Rustige ) or even worked as lecturers at the same time ( Eduard Schmidt von der Launitz ) probably contributed a considerable amount. In addition, Reiffenstein was a lifelong friend of the Kronberg painter colony's circle of friends , also due to his academic background and the careers of his fellow students .
His style of painting, which was completed in the 1840s and which combined the academic realism typical of the period on the one hand, and romantic influences on the other, he has neither abandoned nor significantly further developed in the more than four decades of his work. With a few exceptions, his representations are characterized by extraordinary accuracy in detail, especially with regard to scale and lighting conditions.
On the other hand, although the architecture was the dominant object of his work, his pictures are never cold and documentary, but almost always immersed in the light of a rising or setting sun and are of great, but initially often somewhat heavy, color. Only in the later work, especially after making contact and traveling to French-speaking countries, does the latter clear up to a certain extent. The cityscapes are always filled with life through rich decorations with accessories.
literature
- Albert Dessoff: Monographic Lexicon of Frankfurt Artists in the Nineteenth Century. In: Frankfurter Kunstverein (ed.): Art and artists in Frankfurt am Main in the nineteenth century. Joseph Baer, Carl Jügel's Verlag, Heinrich Keller, FAC Prestel, Moritz Abendroth, Frankfurt am Main 1907–1909, pp. 116, 117.
- Wolfgang Klötzer (Hrsg.): Frankfurter Biographie . Personal history lexicon . Second volume. M – Z (= publications of the Frankfurt Historical Commission . Volume XIX , no. 2 ). Waldemar Kramer, Frankfurt am Main 1996, ISBN 3-7829-0459-1 .
- Hans Lohne: Frankfurt around 1850. Based on watercolors and descriptions by Carl Theodor Reiffenstein and the painterly plan by Friedrich Wilhelm Delkeskamp. Waldemar Kramer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1967, ISBN 3-7829-0015-4 .
- Heinrich Weizsäcker: Reiffenstein, Karl Theodor . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 53, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1907, p. 282.
- August Wiederspahn, Helmut Bode: The Kronberg painter colony. A contribution to Frankfurt art history in the 19th century. With documentary contributions by Änne Rumpf-Demmer, Julius Neubronner and Philipp Franck. Third, significantly expanded edition. Waldemar Kramer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1982, ISBN 3-7829-0183-5 , pp. 213, 214.
Web links
- Literature by and about Carl Theodor Reiffenstein in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by Carl Theodor Reiffenstein at Zeno.org .
References and comments
- ↑ The house was completely destroyed in bombing raids on either October 4, 1943 or March 18 to 24, 1944 during World War II; today it would be roughly in the middle of the Kleinmarkthalle built there after the war .
- ^ Hans Lohne: Frankfurt around 1850. Based on watercolors and descriptions by Carl Theodor Reiffenstein and the painterly plan by Friedrich Wilhelm Delkeskamp. Waldemar Kramer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1967, ISBN 3-7829-0015-4 , p. 64; Quotation from the manuscripts by Reiffenstein printed here in excerpts: “My parents' house, the scene of my youth, in which I was born and turned 23. [...] ".
- ↑ This is located behind the Zeil on the eastern corner of Hasengasse, it was only created after the Second World War when the Kleinmarkthalle located here was destroyed. By moving to the also totally destroyed area, in which u. a. Reiffenstein's birthplace was located, and the southern widening of the Zeil resulted in the open space in Hasengasse. This has recently been reduced by almost half of its former area through the expansion of the C&A to the south.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Reiffenstein, Carl Theodor |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Reiffenstein, Karl Theodor |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German architecture and landscape painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 12, 1820 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Frankfurt am Main |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 6, 1893 |
| Place of death | Frankfurt am Main |