Jakob Fischer-Rhein

Jakob Fischer-Rhein (actually: Jakob Fischer; born January 28, 1888 in Düsseldorf ; † October 28, 1976 in Miltenberg ) was a German draftsman , portrait and landscape painter .

Life

The son of a wheelwright from East Prussia and a farmer's daughter from the Lower Rhine already showed a clear artistic talent as a schoolboy, which his father, as a successful designer of railway wagons, initially did not want to know about. After training as a technical draftsman , he was accepted into the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 1905 . A scholarship to the South Kensington Art School in London enabled him to carry out intensive watercolor studies between 1905 and 1910 . In 1911 he continued his studies with Eduard von Gebhardt , Willy Spatz and Julius Paul Junghanns in Düsseldorf and with Gabriel von Max at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and took over the representation of the renowned Düsseldorf artist paint company H. Schmincke & Co.

During the First World War , Jakob Fischer-Rhein fell into French captivity as an officer in the autumn of 1915 , which led him from the wet casemates at Chateau d'If to a prison ship in the Bay of Marseille on the Ile de Ré near La Rochelle until 1920 . He also met art-loving commanders who not only allowed him to draw and paint , but also procured the necessary utensils, so that after his dismissal he returned to Düsseldorf with around 200 highly regarded works in his luggage. Study trips took him to Holland , Belgium , France and America , where he was able to establish himself as a sought-after painter on the Hudson River in New York until Black Friday on October 25, 1929. In the years of distress that followed, powerful charcoal drawings were created that show, among other things, the Manhattan skyline , the harbor, the steel skeletons of half-finished high-rise buildings and St. Patrick's Cathedral lying in a deep ravine in the midst of gigantic skyscrapers .

The offer of his fellow student from Düsseldorf, Werner Peiner , freed him from his financial plight to produce monumental wall paintings in National Socialist Berlin based on his sketches and to sketch the prominent figures of Berlin's cultural scene as a press illustrator. After losing his apartment and studio to British bombs on the night of September 4, 1943, Jakob Fischer-Rhein moved to Miltenberg , which he only knew from a cultural film about Franconia and as the home of the painter Philipp Wirth . The romanticism of the winding half-timbered town in the picturesque Main Valley , largely spared from the destruction of the war , offered the painter and draftsman a wealth of attractive motifs. Since canvas and paints were hard to come by in the last years of the war and the first post-war years, he first created expressive drawings and later many delightful paintings with motifs and views of Miltenberg, Bamberg , Rothenburg , Dinkelsbühl , Nördlingen , Regensburg , but also Cologne , Bremen and Paris , Marseille , Rome , Venice , Milan and Greece .

Jakob Fischer-Rhein was not a critical, reflective painter. For him, the professors of the Düsseldorf Academy always remained a role model and he proudly called himself an academic painter all his life . He refused to accept modern trends, even if Lyonel Feininger appreciated the aesthetic Cubism and Albert Marquet's cityscapes .

literature

• 750 years of the city of Miltenberg 1237–1987. Contributions to the history, economy and culture of a Franconian city, Miltenberg 1987. DNB 871122626

Web links

• Website about Jakob Fischer-Rhein
• Selection of works by Jakob Fischer-Rhein . In: artnet.de