Carl Wilhelm August Kruger

Carl Wilhelm August Krüger (born June 11, 1797 in Stettin , † December 22, 1868 in Münster ) was a German lawyer and art collector .

Life

Krüger was born on June 11, 1797 in Szczecin. As origin, he stated Westphalia, which probably relates to his parents and explains his alleged Roman Catholic denomination. Krüger probably spent his childhood and youth in Stettin, where he was sworn in on August 12, 1818 at the Higher Regional Court as an auscultator, as a trainee lawyer. Before that he served in 1815 as a "volunteer in the Guard Dragoon Regiment", although he no longer took part in fighting, he did so on July 22nd in the victory march in Paris. After a year of service in Stettin, Krüger served as a trainee lawyer in Stettin and Merseburg from 1820 to 1824 and was transferred to Frankfurt an der Oder in 1825, where he was promoted to assessor. In 1826 Krüger came to Münster, then to Minden in April 1827. He always served in the Prussian governments of the provinces and districts. In 1828 he was transferred to Opole, where he was promoted to the government council, in 1830 he was transferred to Aachen and in 1835 again to Minden, where he was appointed secret government councilor in 1845 and, in 1859, received his departure at his own request due to illness. A little later he moved to Münster with his daughter Anna Maria Luise Ida, born in 1831, where he died on December 22, 1868 of a lung disease.

Art collection

From Krüger's considerable collection of books, engravings, paintings and handicrafts, the German art historian Johann David Passavant praised the proportion of paintings from the Westphalian school, which even Passavant was completely unknown until then. In 1847 the German painter and art historian Ernst Förster judged : “To Mr. Geh. Oberregierungsrath Krüger in Minden has succeeded in collecting a number of panels by older Westphalian masters and thus saving a rich and valuable material for art history. This deserving art lover arranged and described his collection with great diligence and precise knowledge, and the following notes on it have largely been taken from his pleasant communications. In 1848 the Minden publisher JCC Bruns published the “Directory of the collection of paintings of the secret government councilor Krüger zu Minden”, which was probably written by Krüger himself. Krüger himself explained his sometimes idiosyncratic acquisition strategies with the words: Once he is on the trail of a work of art, he has "something of the lion ... that has tasted blood".

Around 1853 Krüger began selling his collection, which finally, after the Royal Museum in Berlin had shown no interest, largely went to the National Gallery in London. A contemporary complained: "In this way Germany has again lost an irreplaceable artificial pearl!"

A part of Krüger's collection also came to his son-in-law Alexander von Frankenberg and Proschlitz (1820–1893), and from this in 1881 via the Westphalian Art Association to what is now the LWL Museum for Art and Culture in Münster.

literature

• Fritz, Rolf: The catalog of the painting collection Krüger zu Minden, in: Westfalen, Bd. 29, 1951, 87-97
• Pfeiffer, Götz J .: "Something about the lion ... that licked blood". Carl Wilhelm August Krüger (1797–1868) and his collection, in: Mitteilungen des Mindener Geschichtsverein, Vol. 77, 2005, pp. 115–142
• Pfeiffer, Götz J .: "My collection has ... become a burden to me". Miscellen to the Minden collector and government official CWA Krüger (1797–1868), in: Mitteilungen des Mindener Geschichtsverein, Vol. 86, 2014, pp. 141–150.
• Schmidt, Wilhelm Karl: Carl Wilhelm August Krüger. A great art collector in the middle of the last century, in: Mindener Heimatblätter, Vol. 25, 1953, 62–65.

Individual evidence

1. ^ JD Passavant: Art trip through England and Belgium, together with a report on the construction of the cathedral tower in Frankfurt am Main , Frankfurt am Main 1833, pp. 400–402.