Christian Philipp Koester
Christian Philipp Koester (born February 13, 1784 in Friedelsheim in the Palatinate ; † November 29, 1851 in Heidelberg ; also Christian Köster ) was a German painter and restorer .
Life
Koester's parents, Philipp Christian Wilhelm Koester (1744–1806) and Maria Charlotte b. Wernborner (1750-1834), were wealthy, the father was a judge, notary and winery owner in Friedelsheim. After attending grammar school (in Mannheim or Heidelberg, where the family repeatedly fled from the French revolutionary troops between 1794 and 1799), he enrolled at Heidelberg University as a student of "cameralistics" (economics and administration). However, his interest in art led him to the studio of the Heidelberg vedute painter and copper engraver Johann Jakob Strüdt (1773–1807), who instructed him in landscape painting . In contrast, he seems to have given up his studies after a short time.
After learning the basics, Koester trained as a painter on his own between 1800 and 1805. In Mannheim he drew from nature, in Munich he copied Claude Lorrain's pictures without registering as an apprentice at the art academies in both places . He also seems to have taken a study trip to Switzerland . For the year 1806 he is recorded as a listener of the lecture of the Heidelberg classical philologist Karl Philipp Kayser (d. 1827) on Sophocles' Oedipus . In 1807 he left for Italy and spent the next time in Rome. There Koester, who was also musically gifted and played the piano very well, belonged to the circle around Wilhelm von Humboldt , where he worked as a singer and conductor and taught the children of the then Prussian ambassador as a music teacher.
Back in Germany he lived in his parents' house in Friedelsheim from 1809 to 1813. He painted and frequented the academic and artistic circles of the Heidelberg Romanticism . In 1813 he met the brothers Melchior and Sulpiz Boisserée and advised them on the restoration of an old German painting, whereupon they employed him as a restorer for their collection of paintings. He moved to Heidelberg with his mother and sister and restored a large number of German paintings from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance between 1814 and 1819 , which the Boisserée brothers had acquired in order to save them from certain loss - much to the delight of Johann Wolfgang Goethe , who visited the collection in 1815. On this occasion, Goethe Koester expressed his great appreciation. In 1819 the collection was relocated to Stuttgart . In 1822, Koester turned down Melchior Boisserée's offer to continue working for him.
The artist also continued his musical inclinations in Heidelberg: in 1817 he joined the singing group that the Heidelberg legal scholar Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut set up to maintain old Italian and Dutch music and the treasure trove of German folk songs rediscovered by the Romantics . After Thibaut's death he led this circle.
With his friend and later brother-in-law Jakob Schlesinger (1792–1855), also a painter and active for the Boisserée brothers, Koester traveled to Dresden in 1821 . In 1823 he successfully exhibited his own works for the first time in Karlsruhe . In 1824 he followed Schlesinger, who had been appointed to Berlin, and received the position of restorer at the Royal Picture Gallery , for which he restored works from the newly acquired Edward Sollys collection . Between 1827 and 1830 he published three booklets on the restoration of old oil paintings in Heidelberg , which are still part of the mainstream literature today. Regarding the new edition of these writings published in 2001 in a volume of the series Library of the Restorer , the editors note:
“Christian Philipp Koester was one of the first restorers. In his three writings on the restoration of old oil paintings , he not only describes the restoration methods used, but also explains the problem of restoration from an ethical point of view. Koester sees the work of art as an aesthetic and historical document and, with this view, which is still valid today, marks the replacement of tradition with historical awareness. [...] His thoughts on the restoration of old oil paintings are considered to be groundbreaking in the history of restoration. "
In 1830 Koester turned down the permanent position he had been offered at the Royal Academy and returned to Heidelberg, probably out of love for his mother, whom he looked after until her death. In 1833 he published the Scattered Thoughts sheets on art , the first of an irregular series of booklets - five appeared in total, the last in 1848 - to which his Berlin friend, the bookseller and antiquarian Gustav Parthey (1798–1872) also contributed. With Parthey he went on an art trip to the Netherlands in 1839 . In Germany, too, Koester visited many of the art venues where works by old masters were exhibited. In the last years of his life he was still a guest of the Boisserée family in Cologne and allowed his friends to take him to the cathedral and the Ferdinand Franz Wallraf collection .
Eduard Mörike and Gottfried Keller are among the many writers and poets with whom Koester was closely related in the course of his life . From 1824 to 1825 he exchanged letters with Mörike about the mysterious young woman whom the twenty-year-old poet loved and sang about as “Peregrina”. Her name was Maria Meyer, lived an unsteady wandering life and stayed temporarily in Heidelberg. The young Keller came to Heidelberg to study and visited Koester for the first time in the fall of 1848. He showed Koester his poems and drawings and asked for his judgment. The conversations he had with him about Dürer's engraving Melencolia I inspired him to write the poem Melancholie , published in 1851 . Keller gave the following, somewhat boyish description of his interlocutor to a painter friend:
“[Koester] is a male 3½ feet with a hump and ice gray hair and lives in a vanished world. At that time he restored the entire Boisserée collection; he told me the full story of it, for bit by bit it passed through his hands. Otherwise he also paints landscapes as they were painted before Philipp Hackert , is a Goethean gourmet and a highly conservative aesthetician; in our artistic society he would be a prophet and a venerable patriarch. Mr. Köster also writes about art [...] and composes music. He knows all the celebrities of the past years and tries to take care of the budding talents in a fatherly way in order to possibly lead them back to those taste tracks. He hates my other friend, the Frieze , terribly, and it takes his heart off when I am malicious enough to say that I come straight from him. However, there is still much to learn from this venerable remnant of a bygone period, and I am happy to go to him. "
Christian Philipp Koester died on November 29, 1851, at the age of 67, in his domicile at Heidelberg Jubilee Square. His grave inscription in the mountain cemetery read: “Don't look for me here, look for me in your hearts. If you don't find me there, you won't find me here either. "
literature
- Fr. A. Pietzsch: Christian Philipp Koester, the nestor of the Heidelberg painters of the Romantic period. In: Karl Schwingel (Ed.): Festschrift for Karl Lohmeyer. West-Ost-Verlag, Saarbrücken 1954, pp. 223-228.
- Thomas Rudi: Christian Philipp Koester (1784-1851). Painter and restorer. Monograph with a critical catalog of oeuvre . Long. Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-631-32446-4 .
- Michael Kohnen: Christian Philipp Koester (1784-1851) . In: Carl-Ludwig Fuchs, Susanne Himmelträger (ed.): Biedermeier in Heidelberg: 1812–1853 . Heidelberg 1999, p. 69 (there also a portrait of Koesters).
Web links
- Literature by and about Christian Philipp Koester in the catalog of the German National Library
- Website of the exhibition Biedermeier in Heidelberg (1999) with further pictures of Koester.
- Homepage of the Friedelsheim community, section about the painter Christian Philipp Koester ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
Individual evidence
- ^ Christian Philipp Koester: About restoration of old oil paintings . Edited and with an introduction by Thomas Rudi (= restorer's library. Volume 5). Seemann, Leipzig 2001, ISBN 3-363-00755-8 (photo print of the original edition in one volume).
- ^ Letter to Salomon Hegi. January 28, 1849. In: Gottfried Keller: Collected letters . 4 volumes, ed. by Carl Helbling, Benteli, Bern 1950–1954. Vol. 1. p. 214.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Koester, Christian Philipp |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Köster, Christian |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German painter and restorer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 13, 1784 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Friedelsheim |
| DATE OF DEATH | November 29, 1851 |
| Place of death | Heidelberg |