Friendship Gallery
A portrait collection, which mainly contains works of painting ( paintings ), is called a friendship gallery. Usually it is a private collection for representation purposes.
historical development
The first large private portrait collections arose in the early modern period at royal courts and sometimes also in the vicinity of wealthy representatives of humanism . However, they owed their creation primarily to political, historical or professional motives. Outstanding examples are the portrait gallery of Paolo Giovio in Como , which also contained portraits of friends and contemporaries, or the portrait collection created by Andrea del Castagno in the Villa Pandolfini in Florence around 1450 . In the 1730s, the first portrait and friendship galleries were laid out in England, for example in the English Garden at Stowe .
In Germany, sophisticated private friendship galleries, comprising dozens of portraits, did not emerge until the second half of the 18th century. Largely preserved, important friendship galleries in German-speaking countries were laid out in the last third of the 18th century by the Leipzig publisher Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim , Philipp Erasmus Reich and Angelika Kaufmann .
Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim's friendship gallery, built up from 1750, comprised 110 individual portraits towards the end of the century. At the end of the 1760s, in addition to friends and relatives, venerable contemporaries who were not personally known were also accepted. In his will, Gleim determined the preservation of the collection, which was to be expanded annually to include the portrait of a deserving German man. Philipp Erasmus Reich's friendship gallery is said to have included 42 individual portraits at its peak. Before the widow's departure in 1802, the collection was transferred to the University of Leipzig .
A quantitative and qualitative special form is the friendship gallery of the Munich publicist and publisher Johann Baptist Strobl , created from the 1780s onwards . It comprises 200 portraits of venerable Bavarian personalities made by a single artist, Joseph Georg Edlinger . Due to the large size and the ideological assignment of Strobl and the sitters, this friendship gallery is viewed by some art historians as the portrait gallery of the Bavarian Order of Illuminati .
Johann Caspar Lavater's theory of physiognomic ideas influenced the presentation from the 1770s. Outstanding committed artists in German-speaking countries were, in addition to Angelika Kaufmann, Heinrich Pfenninger and, in particular, Anton Graff .
The emergence of photography brought about the end of the lavish and costly friendship galleries.
Significant preserved friendship galleries
- Gleim's friendship stamp in the Gleimhaus in Halberstadt .
- The friendship gallery of the Leipzig publisher Philipp Erasmus Reich, which has been kept in the custody of the University of Leipzig since 1802 with 31 of probably 42 individual portraits .
- Strobel's Iluminatengalerie is archived in various Bavarian museums.
- The friendship gallery of the painter Friedrich Boser in Düsseldorf with 57 individual portraits from the years 1835–1845.