Gabriel Ambrosius Donath
Gabriel Ambrosius Donath de Grunau (* 1684 in Grunau , Upper Lusatia , † January 1760 in Dresden ) was a German painter.
Life
The Catholic first studied philosophy and law in Prague . Donath then went to a painting school in Prague. After his marriage in 1705 to Anna Appollonia Maria Rosalia Freydenreich, who came from Remlingen , he worked as a portrait painter in Görlitz .
In 1733 Donath went to Dresden and lived mainly from miniature painting. With the accession of August the Strong , who was considered an art lover, Donath was promoted to court artist. On March 16, 1734, he presented the Electress Maria Josepha with a portrait. Since 1737 Donath can be traced back to Maria Josephas as a liberator and cabinet painter .
Donath's appearance was noticeable. His flowing beard and Hungarian clothes meant that he was mistaken for a Jew several times and prevented from passing through the city gates. The elector therefore ordered the painter to put up a self-portrait in the main guard on Dresden's Neumarkt .
Donath, who had been widowed since 1757, died without descendants in 1760 on the Schlagfluss river .
plant
Works of his work as a court painter can be found in Germany, Poland and Austria. His best known is probably the self-portrait with portrait medallion of August III. from 1743, which can be traced back to the Wilanów Royal Castle in Warsaw since 1850 . After an odyssey as German and Russian looted art from the Second World War, it has been in this location again since 1954 and was also shown in the exhibition Unter einer Krone between 1977 and 1998 . Art and culture of the Saxon-Polish Union presented. In addition to portraits and the contemporary miniatures, Donath also designed designs for church interiors.
Despite his work as a court painter, Donath also painted altars and frescoes in some Catholic churches in the Dresden area. For his home parish he designed an altarpiece with the depiction of the beheading of John the Baptist for the new church that was built between 1739 and 1740. The people of Grunau found this gift too gloomy and in 1871 commissioned a new painting from a painter from Ostritz .
Donath also created the portraits of the Mayor of Görlitz, Georg Emerich , which were engraved in copper for the book Das Heilige Grab in Görlitz .
The miniatures of his early work have not survived, as the colors of these biblical representations, which were painted on copper , brass or zinc for church decorations , have crumbled over time. In addition to these, Donath also made medallions with portraits of his family and sayings in Upper Lusatian dialect, which were in the possession of the Grunau parish until 1945 and were last seen in Bautzen in 1935 . Other works by the painter are in the possession of the St. Marienthal Monastery .
literature
- Bernd Mälzer: On the 240th anniversary of the death of the Grunau painter Gabriel Ambrosius Donath , in: Zittauer Geschichtsblätter 3–4 / 2000, ISSN 1439-2739
Web links
- Portraits of Donath in the Deutsche Fotothek of the SLUB Dresden
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Donath, Gabriel Ambrosius |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German painter |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1684 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Grunau , Upper Lusatia |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 1760 |
| Place of death | Dresden |