Charles-Frédéric Soehnée

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Charles-Frédéric Soehnée (born November 3, 1789 in Landau in the Palatinate as Carl-Friederich sons; † May 1, 1878 in Le Pré-Saint-Gervais near Paris ) was a French painter and manufacturer of varnishes.

CF Soehnée around 1812

Life

Charles-Frédéric Soehnée was born as the fourth child of the businessman Johann Jakob Friederich Söhne (Jacques Frédéric Soehnée) and Caroline-Wilhelmine (née Krüger) in Landau in the Palatinate in 1789.

After his father and his brother Johann Michael Söhne (Jean-Michel Soehnée) had completed an apprenticeship with the Pourtalès family , a large trading company in Neuchâtel / Switzerland, and where they later took on managerial positions, they founded the company “Soehnée l'aine & Cie ”, which produced colored and printed fabrics. Their factories were in the cities of Mühlhausen, Colmar and Munster in Alsace. They employed over 1500 workers there. The company was based in Paris, where their families also moved.

In Paris, Charles Frederic Soehne studied painting from 1810 with the neoclassical painter Anne Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson . His classmate and friend Pierre Louis de Laval (1790–1842) painted a portrait of him in 1812. Soehnée must have dealt intensively with the painting technique of the old masters and the composition of their painting materials, because in 1822 he received his doctorate on this subject.

Charles-Frédéric Soehnée founded the Soehnée Frères company in Paris with a brother in 1829 . The company's success earned him numerous awards. His economic success made him rich and independent, so that he was not dependent on selling his paintings.

Soehnée owned a collection of drawings by the baroque painter Joseph Parrocel (1646–1704), which is now in the Louvre collection .

The artistic work

Fishermen on stilts

Until a few years ago, the sensational and bizarre artistic work of Charles-Frédéric Soehnée was completely unknown, as Charles-Frédéric Soehnée and his work still pose a whole series of puzzles to us. At the end of 2008, the German painter Otfried H. Culmann rediscovered him for the German-speaking public.

Soehnée's productive creative phase seems to have been extremely short. All of the watercolors he has found so far date from the period between 1817 and 1819. So far, around seven albums have been found from this period with a few hundred watercolor drawings in the format approx. 22 × 35 cm.

The watercolors show fantastic scenes of nomads in a desolate desert with gigantic rats, moles, snails, crabs, bird skeletons, pterosaurs, cubes and other strange monstrous beings on which people, wrapped in large robes, sometimes ragged, ride. Groups of people with their backs to the viewer let themselves be pulled onto carts by dinosaur skeletons. apocalyptic visions of a world in which people are so bad that they have to quench their thirst at the “first rest” on the full teats of a gigantic disgusting rat. A group of people, with a priest wielding the cross in despair, has perched on a crawling, giant nudibranch. Title: "Journey to Hell". A bizarre bestiary with which this last human bunch seems to have come to terms, until the next night and the next day, when the horror becomes even more gruesome.

The scenes look as if Jacques Callot saw Bosch figures through Alfred Kubin's glasses . Soehnée was influenced by Alexandre-Jean Noël (1752–1834) when depicting his characters , but his visions are absolutely unique.

The virtuoso lightness of his brushstrokes and the fragrant delicacy and brightness of his colors, which he then often overpaints and darkens with black washes, stand in tense contrast to his macabre subjects.

His pictures have titles such as Journey to Hell (Voyage en enfer), The Cradle of Death (Le berceau de la mort) or The Place Consecrated in Silence (Lieu consacré au silence), but they do little to solve the riddle of these pictures. It also remains a mystery why he painted such grotesque visions. One possible explanation would be that the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia in 1815 started global climate change, and there were years of drought, floods, famine, rats and snail plagues that terrified people. This dramatic situation could have been a motivation for Soehnée's end-time visions .

Oil paintings by his hand have not yet been found.

A lithograph by Ch.F.Soehnée has also been found so far, with two scenes: “Path to Hell” and “Judgment of Fate”. These were realized by the lithographer Godefroy Engelmann, an Alsatian from Mühlhausen, who founded a printing company there in 1814 and in Paris in 1816 and is one of the pioneers of color lithography in France.

Fonts

  • Charles-Frédéric Soehnée: Research nouvelles sur les procédés de peinture des anciens; suivies de la traduction de différents fragments de l'ouvrage de Lessing sur l'antiquité de la peinture à l'huile Paris: JM Eberhart, 1822.

literature

  • Patrick Mauriès: Charles-Frédéric Soehnée, voyage en enfer . Paris ISBN 2070779505
  • Otfried H. Culmann: The Palatinate Fantast in Paris . In: Rheinpfalz. January 5, 2009

Individual evidence

  1. L'art étrange de Charles-Frédéric Soehnée, à travers une exposition et un livre

Web links

Commons : Charles-Frédéric Soehnée  - collection of images, videos and audio files
  • Soehnée - With many color illustrations, in: Giornale nuovo from March 25, 1997 (engl.)