Heinrich Höfer

Self-portrait ca.1868

Johann Heinrich Höfer (born October 22, 1825 in Eisfeld , † February 10, 1878 in Munich ) was a German landscape and portrait painter.

Life

Höfer came from a respected family of clothiers in Eisfeld , which was impoverished by the advance of the textile industry. His grandfather was the mayor of this town in the Duchy of Saxony-Meiningen, near Coburg. At fourteen he lost his father and had to make a living. He had a talent for drawing and there were china factories in the area; so he learned the craft of porcelain painter. Heinrich wanted more, however. At the age of 22 he set out for the first time to learn portrait painting in Prague. After two years he returned, with little success, because, as he wrote to his brother, he lacked expert instructions and had to “earn his bread” without any support.

1851, at age 25 he went back on the roller , via Dresden, Prague and Linz to Styria to now succeed as a landscape painter. This succeeded - at least financially. In 1855 he settled in the art metropolis of Munich and immediately joined the Münchner Kunstverein . There he, the autodidact , quickly realized how much he still had to learn. He made friends with the Allgäu landscape painter Karl Millner , who introduced him to his art and introduced him to his own role models, Carl Rottmann and Eduard Schleich the Elder . Already earlier he had come across the old Dutch landscape painters such as Berchem , Swanevelt and Waterloo , Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin as role models through Salomon Gessner's "Brief über die Landschaftsmalerey" , which he was now able to copy in the Munich Pinakothek.

In order to conduct systematic studies of nature and to collect motifs for his ideal landscapes, Heinrich went on extensive trips every year. They took him to the Bavarian Alpine foothills, Salzburg, Tyrol and Switzerland. He became an accomplished and successful landscape painter, whose works sold well abroad. He worked regularly at the Chiemsee and on the Fraueninsel, in whose artist chronicle he immortalized himself in 1863 with a watercolor. In 1867 he married the doctor's daughter Mathilde Nenninger from Eisfeld. From this marriage two sons were born; one, Wilhelm, became a doctor, the other an artist: the later Scholle painter and youth illustrator Adolf Höfer . Heinrich bought a three-story house in Munich's Gabelsbergerstrasse , in which the family lived on the first floor; in addition, he had a rear building erected with six painting studios. The painter Christian Mali was one of his friends, as well as prominent Munich residents like the architects Albert Schmidt and Georg von Hauberrisser .

The family was financially secure through the rental income, but Mathilde died in 1873 and in the night of February 10th to 11th, 1878 Höfer himself died at the age of 52, both of tuberculosis. With his second wife Amalie, geb. Ruhwandl, also a doctor's daughter from a respected Munich family, still had the opportunity to go on the long-awaited trip to Italy. Amalie raised the two sons from her first marriage; her own two daughters died in childhood. She outlived her husband by almost 40 years and died in 1917.

plant

Heinrich Höfer, mountain landscape

On the Fraueninsel in the Chiemsee, watercolor

Höfer began as a portrait painter, which he also used to finance his early art trips. Family portraits, including three self-portraits, have survived. He is known and recognized primarily as a landscape painter. He is attributed to the Munich school and the Chiemsee painters. His works are still traded today at good prices on the international art market. His ideal landscapes mainly contain alpine and Chiemsee motifs, often with the Zugspitze massif or the glacier mountains of the Bernese Oberland in the background. In the middle distance rural scenes with cattle or horse and carts and small, detailed staffage figures. Another popular subject is Nuremberg city scenes. Following old Dutch models, he also repeatedly created winter landscapes, often with reflective ice surfaces.

He brought back numerous watercolors and drawings from his travels, which he used as models. Several can be found in the Maillinger Collection of the Munich City Museum and in the State Collection of Graphics in Munich . His paintings can be found, or were found in numerous museums, e.g. B. in the municipal museum Bamberg (winter landscape), in the Schlesisches Museum Breslau (Bavarian mountain village in winter), in the Upper Austrian State Gallery Linz (alpine hut in Pinzgau) and in the Braith-Mali-Museum Biberach.

Exhibitions

Since 1858 he has shown his works regularly at exhibitions in Munich, a. a. also in Berlin, Dresden, Lübeck, Lucerne. The castle museum in his hometown Eisfeld held its first comprehensive solo exhibition in 2014. To this end, an illustrated catalog raisonné was published, supplemented by his “drawings and sketches” and his “letters”.

literature

• Nekrolog - Heinrich Höfer. In: Kunstverein München (ed.): Report on the existence and work of the Kunstverein in Munich during the year 1878. Munich 1879, pp. 68–69.
• Höfer, Heinrich. In: Friedrich von Boetticher: painter works of the 19th century. Contribution to art history. Volume 1/2, sheets 31–61: Heideck – Mayer, Louis. Ms. v. Boetticher's Verlag, Dresden 1895, p. 549 ( archive.org ).
• Höfer, Heinrich . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 17 : Heubel – Hubard . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1924, p. 190-191 .
• Horst Ludwig: Heinrich Höfer. In: Bruckmann's Lexicon of Munich Art. 19th century Munich painter. Volume 2: Gebhardt – Kustner. Bruckmann Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-7654-1802-1 , p. 208.
• Horst Ludwig: ideal vedutas by Anton Doll and Heinrich Höfer. In: Weltkunst. 57, No. 20, 1987, pp. 2888-2891.
• Höfer, Heinrich. In: Emmanuel Bénézit (ed.): Dictionnaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs. Volume 7, Paris 2006, p. 178.
• Heinrich Höfer. A Munich painter from Eisfeld. Catalog raisonné. (= Heiko Haine (Hrsg.): Writings and catalogs of the Museum Eisfeld. Volume 2) Museum Eisfeld 2014, ISBN 978-3-87707-927-0 .
• Heinrich Höfer: Letters to his brother Michael in Eisfeld. (= Frohmut Gerheuser (Ed.): Höfer'sche family writings. Volume 3). Graefelfing 2014 (private print).
• Heinrich Höfer, drawings and sketches. (= Frohmut Gerheuser (Hrsg.): Höfer'sche family writings. Volume 4). Graefelfing 2014 (private print).

Web links

Commons : Heinrich Höfer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ^ Salomon Gessner: Letter on landscape painting. Zurich 1770 ( projekt-gutenberg.org ).
2. ^ Heinrich Höfer, drawings and sketches. (= Frohmut Gerheuser (Hrsg.): Höfer'sche family writings. Volume 4). P. 8.
3. ^ Karl Raupp , Franz Wolter (ed.): The artist chronicle of Frauenchiemsee. 2nd edition, Munich 1924, p. 65.
4. ^ Carl Albert Regnet : Nekrolog . In: Carl von Lützow (Hrsg.): Journal for fine arts . tape 13 . EA Seemann, Leipzig May 16, 1878, Sp. 500 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive - supplement to the magazine for visual arts, 13th year, no. 51).
5. ↑ Nekrolog - Heinrich Höfer. In: Kunstverein München (ed.): Report on the existence and work of the Kunstverein in Munich during the year 1878. Munich 1879, pp. 68–69.
6. ↑ ^{a b} Höfer, Heinrich . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 17 : Heubel – Hubard . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1924, p. 190-191 .
7. ^ Heinrich Höfer. A Munich painter from Eisfeld. Catalog raisonné. (= Heiko Haine (Hrsg.): Writings and catalogs of the Museum Eisfeld. Volume 2) Museum Eisfeld 2014.