Egidius Mengelberg

Egidius Mengelberg

Egidius Mengelberg (born April 8, 1770 in Cologne ; † October 26, 1849 there ) was a German portrait painter, interior designer and art teacher.

Live and act

Mengelberg's family came from Linz am Rhein , where his ancestors can be traced back to the 16th century. At the age of thirteen he took lessons from Johann Peter von Langer in Düsseldorf , and when he was sixteen he founded a private drawing school in Cologne. In 1790 he copied some pictures in the Düsseldorf gallery of the Jülich-Bergischen sovereign, Elector Karl Theodor , for a copper engraving catalog of the gallery. After the occupation of the Rhineland by Napoleon's troops , he stayed in Koblenz from 1796 to 1797, where he portrayed numerous French military personnel.

Portrait of Johannes von der Heydt, ca.1800

In 1800 Mengelberg went to Elberfeld , where his father Edmund Mengelberg now lived with his second wife. Portrait painting flourished in the city that grew and prospered rapidly in the course of early industrialization. Mengelberg portrayed numerous personalities of the Wuppertal and became a kind of fashion painter of society. When Heinrich Christoph Kolbe returned to Düsseldorf in 1811 and quickly became the most sought-after portrait painter in the Rhineland, he got in touch with him and let him teach him the techniques he had learned about in Paris. Mengelberg began to imitate Kolbe's style increasingly until Kolbe turned away from him angrily.

Thereupon Mengelberg switched to the design of wallpapers, wall paintings and the furnishing of the villas of the patrician families of the Wuppertal. His biggest assignment was the painting and interior design of the hall of the first reading society in Elberfeld, the so-called "museum".

"In the Schwanenburg zu Kleve", 1829

Mengelberg fell in love with the young Elberfeld Protestant Anne Lisette Risse, whose strictly Reformed parents forbade marriage to the Catholic Mengelberg. In 1813 Mengelberg left Elberfeld with her and moved to Düsseldorf, where their first son Johann Edmund Egidius was born in January 1814. When the second child, Otto Heinrich , was out, the mother's parents finally allowed the wedding, which was celebrated in October 1816.

In 1822 the family moved to Cologne, where Mengelberg founded the "Elementary Drawing School for Builders and Professionalists", a private Sunday school in which unskilled craftsmen were trained free of charge in various arts and crafts and which soon taught several hundred students. Mengelberg ran the “Sunday School” until his death in 1849. He was buried in the Melaten cemetery in Cologne . He became the progenitor of a German-Dutch family of artists, and numerous members of the Mengelberg family became important visual artists or musicians. The Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg was one of his great-grandsons.

According to him, which was Mengelberg street in Cologne's Old Town South named.

literature

• Johann Jakob Merlo : News from the life and works of Cologne artists . Heberle, Cologne 1850, p. 285
• Johann Jakob Merlo:  Mengelberg, Egidius . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 21, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1885, p. 347 f.
• Friedrich Everhard von Mering , Ludwig Reischert: On the history of the city of Cologne on the Rhine: From its foundation to the present. Joh. Wilh. Dieß, Cologne 1838 Volume 1, p. 278
• Marie-Luise Baum: Egidius Mengelberg , In: Wuppertaler Biographien, 10th episode , Wuppertal (Born) 1971
• Michael Werling : Architecture teacher at Cologne University of Applied Sciences Part I / The alumni . Published on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of the department or faculty for architecture at the Cologne University of Applied Sciences, Cologne 2006, p. 139 ff.

Web links

Commons : Egidius Mengelberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Portrait of Mengelberg's “Elementary Drawing School” ( memento from November 7, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) on the website of the Cologne University of Applied Sciences