The grieving royal couple

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The mourning royal couple (Carl Friedrich Lessing)
The grieving royal couple
Carl Friedrich Lessing , 1830
Oil on canvas
215 × 193 cm
Hermitage Saint Petersburg

The mourning royal couple is the title of a painting by Carl Friedrich Lessing based on Ludwig Uhland's poem Das Schloß am Meere . The picture scene, which was completed by 1830 , depicts the emotional pain and grief of a couple of parents over the death of their daughter and is considered the main work of the “romantic-elegiac soul painting” of the Düsseldorf school .

Description and meaning

A king and his wife sit in the stone, suggestive medieval chapel of a ruler's building . Through an open window the view falls on the horizon of a sea. The expression of mourning in the royal figures applies to the death of the daughter. Her coffin is against the wall, hidden under a dark ceiling. With these main elements, the picture takes up the last verse of Uhland's poem Das Schloß am Meere , composed in 1805 :

"I saw both parents,
Without the light of the crown
In black mourning dress;
I did not see the virgin. "

The royal couple, who are illuminated by a light source, sit in a dark, stage-like room, are wrapped in lavishly flowing robes. The king wears a turban-like bonnet with a crown ring. His gaze is dark and rigidly directed forward into space. Perhaps he is struggling with fate because the death of his unwed daughter is the end of his sex. His wife, sunk in melancholy inwardness, sits hunched to his side on the stone bench and looks down. Her right hand rests sympathetically on his limp hand, with her left hand she grabs her head for support. The dramatic expression of the image is concentrated in the posture and gestures of these closely related people who are compositionally connected in superimposed pyramidal figures. The dominance of the screen-filling figures is reinforced by the folds of their robes. Its majestic heaviness and the massiveness of the stone architecture depicted give the painting a monumental character.

An evening sky with rising clouds darkens the mood. Cracked glasses in the lead glazing of the window and a funeral wreath placed on the coffin ceiling indicate the motif of earthly transience. The crouching posture of the grieving ruling couple seems to be repeated in the strange stone figures of the walls, which barely emerge from the semi-darkness of the background and attend the couple like a bizarre mourning party. Only the figure of a female stone sculpture on a column on the right edge of the picture, which resembles a praying Mary, but perhaps because of the dragon attached to her on a shield depicts the Virgin Margaret of Antioch , assumes an upright posture and thus sets a sign of faith and confidence .

Origin and provenance

Through the mediation of the poet lawyer Friedrich von Uechtritz , the Berliner Kunstverein commissioned Lessing for a history painting in 1828 . The painter then suggested to the art association that the composition The mourning royal couple be executed . He developed this in the winter of 1828/29. After Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter and Friedrich von Boetticher , the motif emerged from “Wehmut” about the death of a young girl who was revered in Düsseldorf's artistic circles.

Lessing had already dealt with the subject of death as a budding landscape painter in the painting Kirchhof mit Corpsestein und Ruins im Schnee from 1826. He also processed it in the monastery courtyard in the snow that was built between 1828 and 1830 . In the narrative focus he placed a monastic burial scene with a coffin. The black romance of old walls was also echoed in it.

In contrast to what he was used to with figural staffage in a landscape painting, Lessing was urged by Wilhelm Schadow , the Nazarene -influenced director of the Düsseldorf Art Academy and masterful mentor of the Düsseldorf painters, to fine-paint the figures and objects according to high academic and technical requirements elaborate and carefully arrange the composition. This challenge was not insignificant after he had met with displeasure from Schadow shortly before with a cardboard box for a history painting, which was to be entitled Battle of Iconium , so that - according to the painter Friedrich Schaarschmidt - he actually wanted to give up history painting .

The completed painting was shown at the Berlin academic art exhibition in 1830. Immediately after the raffle, it came into the possession of Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna and then into the collection of the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg . There it is exhibited in room 350 of the General Staff Building.

Reception and aftermath

At his exhibition in Berlin in 1830, the picture immediately became the talk of the day. As a visual implementation of a poetic-literary model and the romantic state of mind expressed in it , it met with applause from the audience and critics. One saw in the painting, which invited the viewer to identify and empathize with the mourners, the “highest realm of soul life” had been reached. The playwright Karl Immermann noted in the same year:

“Lessing seems to be especially called by nature to portray the deeply significant and sublime. His drafts, drawings and pictures reveal a high degree of seriousness. (...) In history he reaches for powerful, authoritative scenes, for moments of a titanic state. (...) Shape, position and folds indicate a heroic age. It is a submerged, larger world that is reflected in this picture. "

In addition, against the backdrop of the events of the July Revolution , the rising bourgeoisie and its movements, there was soon a tendency to attach political and epoch-making importance to the image. The art connoisseur Atanazy Raczyński even declared in 1836 that it was the first work heralding a new age. The art critic Hermann Püttmann said:

“The royal figures are oversized and, like the ghosts of seclusion, protrude into our inner republican presence. (…) The serious, sad royal figures carry devastating reproaches for the present in their powerful, noble features. It is the ancestral portraits of famous ancestors who look angrily from the wall of the gallery in which the crippled descendants indulge in unnerving bacchanalia. (...) It seems to us that the royal couple are saying goodbye to the world and that the coffin of the beautiful daughter means that the loved one has already preceded them. "

The art historian Wolfgang Hütt interpreted this contemporary interpretation on the one hand as a "basic romantic mood" and as "the establishment of an ideal borrowed from the past as an instructive example for the present", on the other hand as "dissatisfaction with the experienced present" and as an "expression of growing opposition".

Eduard Bendemann : The Mourning Jews in Exile , 1832

As a pioneering romantic staging of grief, the painting was a model for the painter Eduard Bendemann . A similar composition of figures can be found in his history painting The Mourning Jews in Exile , created in 1832 . He tied in with Lessing's creation in particular through the dominant figure of the bearded old man who rigidly “brooded” in front of himself. He also reduced the plot in favor of a contemplative representation of melancholy.

Lessing's painting found widespread use through graphic reproductions, for example in 1838 through a re-engraving by Gustav Lüderitz . It also became a popular motif for the performance of living pictures , in Düsseldorf for example at the “Dürer Festival” in 1833, at an evening event in the city ​​theater in 1834 with music from Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and at the “Uhland Celebration” in 1863.

Düsseldorf mourning pictures such as Lessing's royal couple or Bendemann's Jews formed the avant-garde of a wave of similar pictures that gradually flattened out artistically. Art critics and audiences grew tired of them by the late 1830s. There was talk of "Düsseldorf pain, of the softness, of brooding that has become stereotyped".

literature

  • The mourning royal couple, 1830 . In: Wend von Kalnein : The Düsseldorf School of Painting . Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1979, ISBN 3-8053-0409-9 , p. 389 f. (Catalog No. 155).
  • Bettina Baumgärtel : Soul painting and the new heroes of history . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 2, pp. 160 f. (Catalog No. 124).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bettina Baumgärtel : Soul painting and the new heroes of history . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 2, p. 160
  2. ^ The castle on the sea , text in the portal balladen.de
  3. ^ Wolfgang Müller von Königswinter : Düsseldorf artists from the last twenty-five years. Art history letters . Rudolph Weigel, Leipzig 1854, p. 110 ( Google Books )
  4. ^ Lessing, Karl Friedrich . In: Friedrich von Boetticher : painter works of the nineteenth century. Contribution to art history . Volume 1, Dresden 1891, p. 845
  5. ^ Friedrich Schaarschmidt : On the history of Düsseldorf art, especially in the XIX. Century . Art Association for the Rhineland and Westphalia, Düsseldorf 1902, p. 109
  6. ↑ Kunst-Blatt , Issue No. 47, June 11, 1839, p. 187 ( Google Books )
  7. ↑ Quotation in: The mourning royal couple, 1830 . In: Wend von Kalnein : The Düsseldorf School of Painting . Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1979, ISBN 3-8053-0409-9 , p. 390
  8. ^ Atanazy Raczyński : History of modern German art . Volume 1: Düsseldorf and the Rhineland: with an appendix: a trip to Paris . Berlin 1836, p. 155
  9. ^ Hermann Püttmann : The Düsseldorf school of painting and its achievements since the establishment of the art association in 1829. A contribution to modern art history . Otto Wigand, Leipzig 1839, p. 39
  10. ^ Wolfgang Hütt : The Düsseldorf School of Painting 1819–1869 . VEB EA Seemann Buch- und Kunstverlag, Leipzig 1984, p. 51
  11. ↑ Düsseldorfer Zeitung , edition of December 7, 1834, p. 4
  12. ↑ Volker Frech: Living pictures and music using the example of Düsseldorf culture . Master's thesis, Diplomica Verlag, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 978-3-8324-3062-7 , p. 8 ( Google Books )
  13. ^ Vera Leuschner: The landscape and history painter Carl Friedrich Lessing (1808-80) . In: Wend von Kalein, p. 89
  14. ^ Karl Immermann : Düsseldorf beginnings. Mask talks (1840). In: Karl Immermann: Works in five volumes. Edited by Benno von Wiese , Volume 4: Autobiographical Writings , Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 646.