Eduard Steinbrück

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Eduard Steinbrück (with hat and floor-length coat), detail from the caricature Zug by the Düsseldorf artists by Andreas Achenbach , 1837

Carl Eduard Steinbrück (born May 2, 1802 in Magdeburg , † February 3, 1882 in Landeck (today Lądek-Zdrój) in Silesia ) was a German history painter and etcher of the Düsseldorf School .

Life

Steinbrück, the son of a freemasonry businessman, grew up in Magdeburg. Both parents came from Tangermünde . One of his cousins ​​was the lawyer, convert and church historian Wilhelm Martens (1831–1902). During his school days he began to work artistically in his free time. At his father's request, Steinbrück trained as a businessman in Bremen from 1817 . At the end of this apprenticeship, he decided to become a painter. In Berlin , where he did a year of military service after his apprenticeship, he joined Wilhelm Wach's studio in 1822 . As early works, the expulsion of the first human couple from paradise and The Angel at the Heavenly Gate were created around 1825 . In February 1829 he moved to Düsseldorf . There he stayed until October in the company of Karl Ferdinand Sohn , Theodor Hildebrandt , Eduard Bendemann and Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and painted a Hagar in the desert . He then went to Rome , where he stayed among the German Romans from November 1829 to July 1830 and created a Roman woman as a hunting nymph , which the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel acquired in 1832 at a Berlin art exhibition. After returning from Italy, he married Amalia Martens and settled in Berlin until 1833. During this time he painted a Madonna with the child (Madonna in the workshop door) .

Marie among the Elves (Die Elfen) , 1840/1841, black and white illustration

In the summer of 1833 he moved again to Düsseldorf, where he studied under Wilhelm Schadow from 1833 to 1844 at the Royal Prussian Art Academy and lived with his family, which resulted in a daughter and three sons, until 1846. He regularly sent Berlin art exhibitions from Düsseldorf. With pictures exhibited there such as Bathing Children (1834), Thisbe, listening on the wall and Genoveva on the run in the forest (1836), The Nymph of the Düssel (1837), Little Red Riding Hood talking to the wolf in the forest , fisher woman on the beach , Undine (1839), Marie among the Elves (1840/1841) and The Birth of Venus (1846) he acquired the reputation of a master of the romantic idyll , the representation of mythical girls and women as well as fairy tales and children. Between 1853 and 1859 he made pictures of this genre mainly for American art lovers and art dealers. With the monumental painting The Adoration of the Magi , created in 1838 and acquired by the German-American dealer and collector Johann Gottfried Böker and exhibited in his Düsseldorf Gallery in New York City , Steinbrück was also able to work as a painter in the United States make a name for religious history paintings.

Wall fresco Resurrection of Christ , 1847, as a supraporte in the arched niche shown on the right, photo of the chapel in the domed hall of the Berlin Palace , around 1900

Initially a devout listener of Friedrich Schleiermacher's sermons in Berlin and an ardent admirer of the evangelical theologians August Tholuck and Friedrich Wilhelm Krummacher , his turn to Catholicism grew during Steinbrück's time in Düsseldorf, stimulated by his artist friends there, especially by the painter Ernst Deger , who gave him Clemens Brentanos Book The bitter suffering of our Lord Jesus Christ about the life of the mystic Anna Katharina Emmerick . In Düsseldorf Steinbrück was an integrated member of the art scene. Because of his ailing wife, who had her family in Berlin, the Steinbrücks moved back to the capital of Prussia in 1846. She died there in March of the following year.

During his time in Berlin, under King Friedrich Wilhelm IV , he received commissions for state buildings and churches. In 1847 he painted frescoes in the Berlin Palace Chapel , the motif of the Resurrection of Christ in an arched niche and angel figures and heads in medallions in the palace dome. In the same year he also executed wall paintings and medallions in the north dome hall of the Neues Museum , and until 1849 a Christ on the Mount of Olives (Jesus in Gethsemane) in the Friedenskirche near Potsdam . For the Jakobskirche in Berlin he created a Christ on the cross with a burial as a predella , for the St. Hedwig's Cathedral an Adoration of the Shepherds .

The Magdeburg Virgins , 1852–1866

The painting Die Magdeburger Jungfrauen (The Plundering of Magdeburg) , which he painted between 1852 and 1866, is considered to be Steinbrück's main work of history painting . It depicts the cruel devastation of Protestant Magdeburg by imperial troops during the Thirty Years' War . Its focus is the scene of the suicide of Magdeburg virgins, handed down by Otto von Guericke , who throw themselves from the city wall to avoid being desecrated by the imperial soldiers. With this picture, the "painter of elves and fairies" surprised contemporary art critics by showing that he was able to touch such a "hideous material, even from its darkest, shadowy side with such violence". It is almost as if Steinbrück “would like to give evidence of the extent of his representational power, which extends from the loveliest and most tender to the abyss of hell in the human breast”. In 1854 he was appointed professor at the Prussian Academy of the Arts . He was a member from 1841 to 1882.

On July 15, 1858, he converted to the Catholic faith for reasons of conscience, after reading the book Mittheilungen blessed Spirits published in 1856, wrestling with himself and evangelical clergy for a long time and taking religious lessons from Leopold Pelldram . On January 7, 1863, he married Charlotte Witt († 1900). At an advanced age he increasingly turned to the lovely idyll, The fairy tale of the guardian angels and the water mermaids (1870), a Loreley (1872) and a Rübezahl (1872) and Erlkönig's daughters (1874). In March 1876 he retired to Landeck, a spa in Lower Silesia that he had got to know during several summer stays. He died there on February 3, 1882 at the age of 79, spry to the end.

Steinbrück's artistic work was rooted in a late Nazarene conception of art by the Düsseldorf School. The motifs of his pictures, which characterize a soft and lyrical, sentimental-romantic, finely painted style and a mostly delicate color scheme, are often taken from myths and legends and literature, especially the poems and fairy tales of Ludwig Tiecks . Steinbrück transferred the mood in Tieck's poetry "into a naturalistic sphere that already anticipated something in keeping with salon art " ( Wolfgang Hütt ).

A portrait of Steinbrück shows a lithograph from around 1829 in the portfolio of 18 small-format portraits, portraits of the Schadow students , which is preserved in the collection of the artists' association Malkasten . The portrait painter Friedrich Boser also handed down portraits in his friendship gallery of 26 individual portraits of the Düsseldorf School of Painting and their friends, which he made between 1840 and 1853, as well as in the group picture The Bird Shooting of the Düsseldorf Artists in the Grafenberg Forest, created in 1844 together with Carl Friedrich Lessing .

Works (selection)

Children bathing , 1834, Alte Nationalgalerie Berlin
The birth of Venus , 1846

Illustrations (selection)

  • In: German seals with marginal drawings by German artists. - Düsseldorf: Buddeus, (volumes 1–2) 1843. Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf
  • In: Reinick, Robert. Songs by a painter with drawings by his friends on the margins. - between 1836 and 1852.
    • Songs by a painter with drawings by his friends on the margins. - Düsseldorf: Schulgen-Bettendorff, 1838, colored portfolio edition. Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf
    • Songs by a painter with drawings by his friends on the margins. - Düsseldorf: Schulgen-Bettendorff, 1838. Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf
    • Songs by a painter with drawings by his friends on the margins. - Düsseldorf: Buddeus, between 1839 and 1846. Digitized edition of the University and State Library of Düsseldorf
    • Songs by a painter with drawings by his friends on the margins. - Leipzig: Vogel, approx. 1852. Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf

literature

Web links

Commons : Eduard Steinbrück  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedrich Noack : The Germanness in Rome since the end of the Middle Ages . Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Stuttgart 1927, Volume 2, p. 574
  2. ^ Museum Kunstpalast : Artists from the Düsseldorf School of Painting (selection, as of November 2016, PDF )
  3. ↑ Steinbrück's son Ernst Reinhold, who was born in Düsseldorf in 1836, emigrated to Ottawa , Canada with his wife in 1865/1866 after schooling, studying and serving in the Prussian Navy . A little later the couple moved on to Sebastopol in Renfrew County , Ontario . In Canada, they took on British citizenship. He worked in agriculture and the timber trade. Like his father, he converted to the Catholic faith. With his wife Valeska Veronika Valentine, née Milbitz (or Melitz, 1844–1921), and his then four children, he moved to Cleveland ( Ohio ), USA, around 1876 . There he published the Catholic, German-language newspaper Voice of Truth . From 1883 he lived as a pioneer in Glen Ullin, Morton County (North Dakota) , which was founded on the transcontinental route of the Northern Pacific Railway , and from 1890 in Mandan (North Dakota) . He was a member, curator, and amateur archaeologist in the North Dakota State Historical Society . He was particularly interested in archaeological research into the culture of the Mandan Indians. To this end, he operated excavations, for example at Fort Abraham Lincoln . He also appeared as an author with his book My Red Brother and through numerous articles for German-language newspapers in the United States. In Glen Ullin he initiated and supported the construction of the Catholic Church Sacred Heart of Jesus , which was inaugurated in 1886. In 1890 he became a US citizen. When he died in 1918, the couple had 14 children, ten of whom were still alive. - Cf. Ernst R. Steinbrueck , short biography in the history.nd.gov portal ; Ernst Reinhold Steinbrueck , website in the portal de.findagrave .com ; Ernst Reinhold Steinbrück , website in the portal wc.rootsweb.com
  4. ↑ The Adoration of the Magi . In: Catalog of a Private Collection of Paintings and Original Drawings by Artists of the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts . New York 1851 ( digitized )
  5. ↑ Adoration of the Magi, 1838 , website in the sniteartmuseumapp.org portal (Snite Museum of Art, Notre Dame, Indiana)
  6. ^ Bettina Baumgärtel : Chronicle of the Düsseldorf School of Painting . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 9783-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, p. 361
  7. ^ Deutsches Kunstblatt , 3rd year (1852), issue 39, p. 331
  8. ↑ Carl Eduard Steinbrück , short biography on the adk.de portal ( Academy of the Arts Berlin )
  9. ↑ Joseph Friedrich (Ed.): Mittheilungen blessed spirits from the year 1855, by the hand of Maria Kahlhammer, in the report of the Mittheilungen des heil. Archangel Raphael through the mouth of the Crescentia Wolf . Munich 1856 ( digitized version )
  10. ^ Friedrich Wilhelm Franz Nippold : Which roads lead to Rome? Historical illumination of the Roman illusions about the success of propaganda . Bassermann, Heidelberg 1869, p. 200 ff. ( Google Books )
  11. ^ Wolfgang Hütt : Die Düsseldorfer Malerschule 1819–1869 . VEB EA Seemann Buch- und Kunstverlag, Leipzig 1984, p. 53
  12. ↑ catalog no. 48-5, Figure 10 (No. 19, bottom left) and Figure 14 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. 73, 30, 42
  13. ↑ Die Nymphe der Düssel (1837) ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in the portal asgard.nu , accessed on September 11, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.asgard.nu
  14. ↑ Die Elfen , website in the portal sammlung.pinakothek.de ( Neue Pinakothek )
  15. ^ The plundering of Magdeburg , website in the smb.museum-digital.de portal ( National Museums in Berlin )
personal data
SURNAME Steinbrück, Eduard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Steinbrück, Carl Eduard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter of the Düsseldorf School
DATE OF BIRTH May 2, 1802
PLACE OF BIRTH Magdeburg
DATE OF DEATH February 3, 1882
Place of death Landeck (today Lądek-Zdrój) , Silesia