Franz Keller-Leuzinger
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Franz Keller-Leuzinger (born August 30, 1835 in Mannheim , † July 18, 1890 in Munich ) was a German engineer , explorer, cartographer , painter, illustrator , craftsman and writer .
Life and works
Franz Keller was a son of the engineer Joseph Keller and a brother of Ferdinand Keller . In 1841 Joseph Keller became road and hydraulic engineering inspector in Karlsruhe , which is why the family moved to this city. Franz Keller attended the Lyceum in Karlsruhe and then the Polytechnic, which he completed with an engineering examination.
In 1855 he went to Brazil with his father . Keller senior and junior were supposed to develop various traffic routes there on behalf of the imperial government or to explore the possibilities. On October 14, 1867, Franz Keller married a daughter of the Swiss Georg Leuzinger , who temporarily ran a lithographic and photographic establishment in Brazil. For this reason he later called himself Franz Keller-Leuzinger - probably from 1874.
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Franz Keller-Leuzinger traveled to Brazil until 1870 and then returned to Germany. Like his father, who died in 1877, he first settled in Karlsruhe again. In 1874 his work Vom Amazonas und Madeira was published in Stuttgart . Sketches and descriptions from the diary of an expedition . He had made the illustrations with the help of his younger brother using woodcut technology . The book was translated into English and was published under the title The Amazon and Madeira Rivers. Sketches and Descriptions from the Note Book of an Explorer 1874 in London ; A second edition followed in 1876. The work was also partially published in the magazine Le Tour du Monde in 1874 and in the Publications for the National Bolivian Navigation Company in 1875. It was to become Keller's most famous publication. He also published a number of articles in German-language magazines such as B. in Petermanns Mitteilungen and Vom Fels zum Meer ; in Brazil several works appeared in the Relatorio da Agricultura and in the Relatorio da provincia do Paraná . In 1881 various maps, drawings and plans by the hand of Keller-Leuzinger and his father were shown in an exhibition in the National Library in Rio de Janeiro . Some of these works belonged to the private property of Emperor Dom Pedro II. His picture Entrance to the Bay of Rio de Janeiro was shown at an exhibition in Hamburg in 1879.
Keller-Leuzinger, who after his time in Brazil was mainly active in the arts and crafts, initially became head of the art embroidery school founded by Grand Duchess Luise von Baden . Soon afterwards he moved to Hamburg and, in 1880, to Stuttgart, where he worked in similar areas. In 1886 he traveled again to Brazil, where he had to investigate the possibility of settlement on behalf of the German Colonial Association. This trip gave him a heart condition. After his return he moved with his wife to Munich, where he also died.
Keller-Leuzinger illustrated, among other things, the natural history of man by Friedrich von Hellwald . He designed glass and clay vessels and tried to improve the design of the so-called Thun majolica . According to Thieme / Becker, his efforts to combine the folk handicrafts of his time with the old handicrafts and thereby work in the spirit of the "old German style" of the 1870s did not go beyond mere imitation of his models, whereas Kohl reports in his dissertation that Keller-Leuzinger's clay pots, which were shown for the first time at the Munich art and trade exhibition in 1876, caused “a great stir” and earned him an award. However, he then fell out with the Swiss pottery producer and soon after gave up designing vessels.
Some of Franz Keller-Leuzinger's watercolors are in the estate of Prince Hermann zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg in the Hohenlohe Central Archive in Neuenstein of the Baden-Württemberg State Archive under the signature La 140a Bü 46.
literature
- Viktor Hantzsch: Keller-Leuzinger, Franz . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 51, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1906, pp. 106-108.
- Frank Stephan Kohl, Amazonasbilder 1868. Production and circulation of tropical photographs from imperial Brazil , Diss. Marburg 2012, text volume ( digitized version ), especially p. 132 ff.
- Arthur Mehlstäubler, Franz Keller-Leuzinger (1835-1890). Clarification of its importance for Thun majolica and Black Forest majolica in the period of historicism , in: Keramos, 2006, H. 192, pp. 47–56.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Kohl 2012, p. 122
- ↑ Kohl 2012, p. 129
- ↑ From the Amazon and Madeira as a digitized version
- ↑ Kohl 2012, p. 135
- ↑ www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Keller-Leuzinger, Franz |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German engineer, explorer, cartographer, painter, illustrator, craftsman and writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 30, 1835 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mannheim |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 18, 1890 |
| Place of death | Munich |