Johann Christian Gerning

Portrait of Johann Christian Gernings, 1778

Johann Christian Gerning (* 1745 in Frankfurt am Main ; † 1802 ) was a Frankfurt trader and banker who collected insects and Frankofurtensia .

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Like many wealthy Frankfurters of the 18th century, Gerning owned a collection of art and natural objects. It served not only for education and edification, entertainment and enjoyment, but was also used specifically to demonstrate social standards and to improve the social position in Frankfurt's urban society. The Gerning family had only lived in Frankfurt for a generation. His father Peter Florens Gerning came from Bielefeld and after his training in Frankfurt had applied for citizenship in the imperial city in 1732 because he had noticed "how big the difference is between living civilly under a sovereign and in a republique". After his marriage to Anna Elisabetha Schedel in 1741 he bought the house "Zum Großer Lindenfels" in Schnurgasse (Lit. G. No. 73). Johann Christian, born in 1745, grew up there as the only child. In the year of his father's death in 1764, the two appointed guardians sent him to Switzerland for an apprenticeship , which he completed with great reluctance at the Gemuseus trading company in Basel and at Morel & Bertrand in Bern . Back in Frankfurt, he married Maria Magdalena Moors in 1767, the daughter of the lay judge and later town schoolteacher Johann Isaak Moors. In the same year the only son Johann Isaak was born. Gerning had the house in Schnurgasse modernized in 1770 according to plans by the plasterer Christian Benjamin Rauschner; In 1787 he sold it and moved to the more socially respected Roßmarkt , where he acquired a building called "Am Salzhaus". There he hosted the King of Naples, Ferdinand IV of Bourbon, and his wife Queen Maria Carolina , a daughter of Maria Theresa , on the occasion of the imperial coronation in 1790 , and the Prince of Esterházy for the imperial coronation in 1792 . Johann Christian Gerning died in 1802 at the age of 57 from the Schlagfluss. In 1789 Gerning was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

The insect collection

Johann Christian Gerning put together a collection that was quite typical of the 18th century, the focus of which was on natural produce and Frankofurtensia. As a teenager, Gerning began collecting butterflies under the guidance of the Frankfurt chancellor Johann Nikolaus Körner; later there were beetles and spiders as well as birds. Thanks to extensive correspondence with collectors and researchers all over Europe, Gerning - with the active support of his son - was able to put together an insect collection of around 50,000 specimens in 88 boxes; These included butterflies owned by Maria Sibylla Merian . Of course, Gerning also had an extensive scientific specialist library, which allowed him to organize the collection according to the various categories in a taxonometric manner . The collection and library enabled him to play a major role in an important entomological publication, the "Papillons d'Europe", supported by the French tax farmer and collector Gigot d'Orcy , which appeared in Paris from 1779 to 1793 in eight volumes. The Frankfurt artist Maria Eleonora Hochecker provided numerous drawings based on copies from Gerning's collection for the copper plates, which she also colored.

The Frankofurtensien Collection

After his return from training in Switzerland, Gerning not only resumed his insectological collecting activities, he also began to collect Frankofurtensia in 1770 in the form of drawings, engravings, books, coins and medals. While Frankfurt citizens mainly compiled written evidence on the city's history in the 17th and 18th centuries, Gerning was obviously the first collector to also systematically compile visual evidence, which today is an important source for historical research. Presumably he also commissioned artists such as Johann Caspar Zehender and Johann Jakob Koller with the preparation of vedute and building recordings. Gerning arranged the topographical views, representations of architecture and events as well as portraits in several adhesive tapes , for which he had Zehender and Koller design the title pages.

The fate of the collections

After Johann Christian's death, the collection passed to his son Johann Isaak von Gerning in 1802 , who - mixed with his own collections - sold, given away and swapped it bit by bit over the next 30 years. Only a part of the collections can still be identified today. In 1804 he donated four adhesive tapes from the Frankfurtensien collection and a painting by Jakob Marrel to the Frankfurt City Library, which in 1878 transferred them to the newly founded Frankfurt Historical Museum . In 1824 he bequeathed his art and antiquity collection as well as parts of his library to the Nassau Society for Classical Studies (today the Wiesbaden Museum and Nassau State Library ) in return for a life annuity ; the insect collection went to the Nassau Association for Natural History in Wiesbaden (now the Wiesbaden Museum) in 1830 .

literature

• Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff / Kurt Wettengl, Civic Collections in Frankfurt 1700–1830 , Frankfurt 1988.
• Walter Czysz, 175 years of Nassau Association for Natural History and Natural Science Collection of the Museum Wiesbaden 1829–2004 , Wiesbaden 2004, pp. 24–27, 189–191
• Wolfgang Cillessen, ambition and passion. The Frankofurtensia and insect collector Johann Christian Gerning (1745–1802) . In: Frankfurt collectors and donors. Writings Historisches Museum Frankfurt , Volume 32, Frankfurt 2012, pp. 55–72.
• Rhine romance. Art and nature . (Exhibition catalog Museum Wiesbaden), ed. v. Peter Forster. Schnell & Steiner, Wiesbaden, 2013.

Web links

• Lower Saxony cultural heritage: Johann Christian Gerning ( Gerning's ex-libris from 1779)