Friedrich Thöming

Friedrich Thöming (born August 27, 1802 in Eckernförde ; † April 21, 1873 in Naples ) was a marine painter .

Life

Rocky coast near Sorrento

Thöming began his artistic career in 1822 with a series of prints on the Schleswig-Holstein Canal. After training as a lithographer , Speckter & Herterich in Hamburg took a few local views. In 1823 he attended the Copenhagen Art Academy for about a year as a student of Jens Peter Møller and immediately had notable success through purchases for the private collection of Crown Prince Christian Friedrich and the Royal Picture Gallery. Under the influence of CW Eckersberg , he turned to marine painting.

The desire to travel to Italy first led him to southern Germany in 1824, where he stayed afloat as a lithographer in Nuremberg and Munich . In 1827 he arrived in Rome , but his real destination was the Gulf of Naples , where he found the motifs in the summer months for the rest of his life, which he worked into paintings in his Roman studio in winter. His most important sponsor was the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen , who gradually acquired six paintings from him.

In August 1828 Thöming visited Capri for the first time, where he also found accommodation in the legendary " Hotel Pagano " in the following years ; In 1829 he came with the painter August Kopisch , who is considered to be the discoverer of the Blue Grotto. Thöming was one of the first to successfully market the motif of the Blue Grotto in small-format paintings. Thöming sold his paintings of Capri and the coast between Sorrento and Amalfi to wealthy and often prominent travelers to Italy and sent exhibitions in Copenhagen, Hamburg, Munich, Berlin and Frankfurt. Among his companions were the poets Hans Christian Andersen and August Graf von Platen . The architect Gottfried Semper copied some of Thöming's pictures to train his sense of color.

When cholera raged in Italy, he accepted an invitation to Frankfurt / Main, which was presumably made by Carl Mayer von Rothschild , who ran the branch of the Frankfurt bank in Naples. Thöming stayed in Frankfurt for two years, where he made contact with the local art scene and successfully participated in exhibitions.

Around 1840 Thöming was back in Italy, where he was considered a great "celebrity" among the sea painters and a wealthy bachelor. In 1844 he married an 18-year-old Neapolitan and, together with his wife, proved to be a generous host and gracious Cicerone in Rome and Naples. In 1853 symptoms of paralysis appeared, probably as a result of a stroke, which very soon made work impossible. Thöming, his wife and two children fell into bitter poverty. In 1865 it can be traced again in the Hotel Pagano on Capri, then all springs dry up. His widow outlived him by many years; she also died in Naples in 1892.

Services

Thöming came to marine painting through CW Eckersberg, the most important painter of the Danish "Golden Age". Under the influence of Claude Lorrain , he bathed the Gulf of Naples in golden sunlight in his paintings. Its blue tones of the sea and the sky were also praised. In his meticulous style of painting, which forced him to work slowly in the studio, Thöming was much closer to older generation artists such as Philipp Hackert , Josef Rebell and Johann Christian Reinhart , whom he particularly admired, than his contemporaries JC Dahl and Carl Blechen or the painters the "School of Posillipo ", who were among the pioneers of open-air painting.

Works

• A seascape. Moonlight, around 1823. 42 × 58 cm Staten Museum , Copenhagen
• A Danish corvette fires gun salutes, around 1824. 28.2 × 36.6 cm. Thorvaldsens Museum Copenhagen
• Capuchin Monastery of Amalfi, 1828. 55 × 82 cm. Museumsberg Flensburg
• Capri, Marina Piccola, 1829. 45.8 × 80 cm. Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen.
• Landscape near Velletri, around 1830. 26 × 44 cm. Kiel art gallery
• The Blue Grotto on Capri, 1833. 13.1 × 21.5 cm. Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen
• Castell dell'Ovo and the Vesuvius from Mergellina at sunrise, around 1835. MuseumKunstpalast , Düsseldorf
• Rocky coast near Sorrento, around 1844. 65 × 99 cm. Museumsberg Flensburg
• View from Pozzuoli to Ischia with the Epomeo, 1847, 27.8 × 39.4 cm. Museum Eckernförde .

literature

• Ulrich Schulte-Wülwer: Friedrich Thöming - A painter's life in Italy. In: Nordelbingen - Contributions to the history of art and culture in Schleswig-Holstein, vol. 67, 1998, pp. 58–80.
• Friedrich Thöming. Exhibition catalog Museum Eckernförde 2002.
• Ulrich Schulte-Wülwer: Longing for Arcadia - Schleswig-Holstein Artists in Italy, Heide 2009, pp. 183–197. ISBN 978-3-8042-1284-8 .