The Weimar Musenhof - Schiller reading to the court in Tiefurt

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The Weimar Court of Muses - Schiller reading to the court in Tiefurt (Theobald von Oer)
The Weimar Musenhof - Schiller reading to the court in Tiefurt
Theobald von Oer , 1860
Oil on canvas
130 x 170.8 cm
Loan from the Alte Nationalgalerie , Staatliche Museen zu Berlin , to Bellevue Palace , office of the Federal President

The Weimar Musenhof - Schiller in Tiefurt reading to the court , in older mentions also Weimar's golden days , is the title of a group and history picture by Theobald von Oer . The painting was made in Dresden in 1860 and shows a courtly society in the heyday of the Weimar Classics who gathered at the temple of the Muses in Tiefurt Park to hear the poet Friedrich Schiller declaim. The picture promoted the historical myth of the court of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach as the Weimar court of muses, which was widely publicized from the 19th century .

Description and meaning

Theobald von Oer was a respected Dresden history painter who had perfected his painting in the 1830s at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under Wilhelm von Schadow and Theodor Hildebrandt in the spirit of the Düsseldorf School of Painting . In the painting he shows a fictional , ideally arranged scene from the years 1794 or 1795, which ties in with the representation of the Fête galante in Rococo painting:

Friedrich Schiller stands at the center of a 38-member society of the court of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach, highlighted by the background with sky and horizon that opens between trees and illuminated by the evening light falling from behind. In his left hand he is holding a manuscript from which he is reading, with his right hand he underscores his poetic performance with a gesture. In the spring of 1794 he had moved to Jena and a little later began to cultivate an intensive friendly and artistic exchange with the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , which made both legendary friends of the Weimar Classics. Goethe is standing, facing Schiller at the same height, in the middle of the right half of the picture, also illuminated by the painter's lighting, and is following the friend's lecture. In Napoleonic fashion, he tucked his right hand into his vest. The breast star of the House Order of the White Falcon is emblazoned on his frock coat as a sign of his high social position .

Next to him, in a buttoned dark green skirt, Duke Carl August, with his arms folded back, is the only one wearing a hat on his head, in an elegant, observing posture. Sitting at his side, clad in brilliant white, is Duchess Luise . Next to this is Hereditary Prince Carl Friedrich , who is stroking a dog on the head. Princess Karoline Luise is also at her side . Sitting playfully on a footstool, she holds a bouquet of flowers in her arms. To the left of the Duke's wife, Duchess Mother Anna Amalie, pensively listening to the words of the poet, looks into space while her confidante, the poet Christoph Martin Wieland , seems to be giving her a hint. The painter depicted Anna Amalia's lady-in-waiting, Charlotte von Stein, and Schiller's sister-in-law, Caroline von Lengefeld , above both of them .

In order to increase the importance of the picture as a representation of a court of muses, the painter added further intellectual greats from Weimar and Jena to his scene behind the declamatory poet: In the middle of the seated people in the left half of the picture, Johann Gottfried Herder appears with devoutly folded hands. Standing above this are Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt , the older one lovingly laying a hand on the younger brother's shoulder. With the other hand, Wilhelm von Humboldt takes the hand of his wife Caroline , who in turn throws a glance at her friends Charlotte von Stein and Caroline von Lengefeld. The fourth member of the Humboldt group is Johann Karl August Musäus .

As an architectural accessory , the painter refined his scene with the Tiefurt Temple of the Muses , which, however, did not exist in 1794/1795, but was only built in 1803. In the middle is the sculpture of Calliope , the sacred muse of the epic and elegy . Tendrils that grow out of the wild thicket of the forest have taken possession of parts of the Monopteros and point to the fact that in Sturm und Drang the ideals of naturalness and originality with the reason and rigor of the Enlightenment , which are reflected in the architectural regularity and geometry of the Embodying the classical temple symbolically, wrestling and helping a new poetic attitude to break through by unleashing the exuberance of emotions, the imagination and the emotional forces.

The painting is the result of a process that spanned several years in which the painter came to grips with the figure Schiller, which is currently interpreted as national history and heroic . As early as the mid-1850s he created the painting The First Lecture of the “Robbers” by Schiller , which was recognized by the public at exhibitions in Dresden, Weimar and Berlin and from 1856 onwards was further distributed as a lithograph by Moritz Golde. It shows Schiller in a room at the Hohen Karlsschule in Stuttgart how he emphatically lectures from his drama Die Räuber to an interested society and is surprised by Duke Karl Eugen , who has just entered , whose grim expression already suggests that Schiller will come into conflict with him . The Deutsches Kunstblatt wrote:

“The history of the heroes of our national spirit is gaining more and more importance in national history in ever wider circles. The representations from the life of Schiller and Göthe are, in the best sense of the word, historical images that could only be peculiar to the German nation. It is therefore not accidental that, like the ever more spreading literature, the visual arts too had to seize these moments for which all German hearts beat the same, as far as the German tongue sounds. Wherever the spirit of Schiller and Goethe moves the heart, a pictorial representation of their life will now be received with the same warm enthusiasm. "

Provenance

Office of the German President on the ground floor of Bellevue Palace in Berlin , on the wall the painting Der Weimarer Musenhof

For Schiller's hundredth birthday, Theobald von Oer had made a drawing that was published as a wood engraving in 1859 . Drawings and wood engravings are now in the collection of the Weimar Classic Foundation . The wood engraving lists the persons depicted on the lower edge - “Musäus, Herder, Wolf, Fichte, Frau v. Humboldt, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Friedrich von Schiller, Wieland, Amalia, Duchess mother, Charlotte and Caroline von Lengefeld, Duchess Louise, von Einsiedel, von Knebel, Duke Carl August, Goethe ”. Drawing and wood engraving formed the basis for the painting from 1860. After the painting, the engraver Ernst Fischer created a lithograph that was printed by Franz Hanfstaengl in the art institute .

The Dresden Association of the German Schiller Foundation bought the picture for 1000 Thaler and then advertised it as the main prize of its "Schiller Lottery". The lottery winner put it up for public sale in 1861. It later entered the collection of the Silesian Museum of Fine Arts in Wroclaw . In 1953 the People's Republic of Poland made it a gift to the GDR . In 1954, the GDR Ministry of Culture transferred it to the National Museums in Berlin , which recently loaned it to Bellevue Palace to furnish the Federal President's office .

literature

  • Weimar's golden days . In: Oer, Theobald Freiherr von . In: Friedrich von Boetticher : painter works of the nineteenth century. Contribution to art history . Volume II / 1, Dresden 1898, p. 188.
  • The Weimar Musenhof - Schiller reading to the court in Tiefurt . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 25 : Moehring – Olivié . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1931, p. 569 .
  • Lothar Brauner, Claude Keisch: The paintings of the National Gallery. Directory. German painting from classicism to impressionism. Foreign painting from 1800 to 1930 . Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, Berlin 1986, undated (inventory catalog).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The first lecture of the robbers , website in the portal akg-images.de , accessed on August 3, 2020
  2. ^ Friedrich Eggers (editor): Deutsches Kunstblatt . Volume VII, No. 49 (December 4, 1856), p. 435 ( digitized version )
  3. Allgemeine Zeitung , No. 185 of July 4, 1861, supplement, p. 3028 ( Google Books )