Gottfried Menken (painter)

Gottfried Menken (born March 4, 1799 in Bremen , † November 26, 1838 in Bremen) was a German painter and graphic artist .

biography

Gottfried Menken, Cossack attack on the Ostertor on October 13, 1813, in the background the burning mill on the Altenwall. Oil painting, around 1830, in the Focke Museum in Bremen

Menken was the son of the Bremen painter Johann Heinrich Menken (1766–1838) and of Ida Adriana geb. Dreyer, daughter of councilor Dr. Gustav Dreyer. He was a nephew of Pastor Gottfried Menken . His painting talents were already evident as a child. He drew and etched at the age of 9 and painted his first oil paintings at the age of 14. With his father he learned the craft of a painter on which he was initially heavily artistically dependent. Father and son even made some pictures together. Whether the paintings with depictions of the liberation of Bremen from the French, such as the event picture of the attack by the Tettenborn Cossacks on the fleeing French on October 13, 1813, actually come from that year, or rather all of them were only created in the 1830s when The Bremen bourgeoisie supported the two artists with commitment after their studio was destroyed in 1827, is an open question. In 1820 he made lithographs a. a. for Brucer's Almanac . In 1824 Gottfried Menken became an honorary member of the Bremen Art Association.

Menken's pictures were popular, so he also painted several pictures with the same motif. The historian Thumsener noted that he was therefore accused of having "lacked fertility in his spirit because he gave in to the demands of art lovers and instead of pondering new compositions, he so often found himself willing to repeat successful, approvingly received objects." In 1827 he drew a view of the Ostertor in Bremen. When his father's house burned down in 1827, he became more independent. Landscapes, horse and genre paintings were created, as was the lithography of the great flood of 1827. Menken was also an art dealer.

literature

• Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X .
• Werner Vogt: The painters Johann Heinrich Menken (1766–1839) and Gottfried Menken (1799–1838) . In: Bremisches Jahrbuch , Volume 53, Staatsarchiv Bremen 1975, p. 143.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Andreas Kreul, in: Doppelganger, cat. Kunsthalle Bremen 1999, p. 32
2. ↑ Justus Gotfried Thumsener: In: Bremer Conversationsblatt , 1839, p. 22 ff