Johann Wilhelm Beyer

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Beyer in a pastel portrait by Gabriele Bertrand, around 1775.

Johann Christian Wilhelm Beyer (born December 27, 1725 in Gotha ; † March 23, 1796 in Hietzing ) was a German sculptor , porcelain artist, painter and garden architect . In 19th century encyclopedias he appears under different first names. Beyer played the largest part in the design of the Schönbrunn Palace Park with statues, which is considered his main work.

Life

Youth and student days

Beyer moved from Gotha to Stuttgart at an early age because his father, the princely Saxon court gardener Johann Nicolaus Beyer , entered the service of Duke Carl Eugen von Württemberg and was a "garden engineer" there.

At the request of his employer, Beyer stayed in Paris between 1748 and 1751 to study architecture and painting. In Rome he began immediately after studying painting away, but turned to sculpture after he had participated in excavations of ancient statues (encounters with Abbate Vineti , the papal antiquarian and superintendent of Roman antiquities, and Winckelmann ).

Model master in Ludwigsburg

After his return to Stuttgart in 1759, Beyer worked as a ducal Württemberg court painter and until 1767 as a model master at the Ludwigsburg porcelain factory , which he helped to flourish with his works. Also in 1759 he presented his plan to German princes to found a German art academy in Rome.

Relocation to Vienna

After Beyer left the ducal service in February 1767, he went to Vienna. As early as 1768 he was a member of the Imperial and Royal Academy, employed at the court in 1769 and in 1770 became an Imperial and Royal Court Painter, Statuarius (sculptor) and Chamber Architect. However, Beyer's reputation as an artist is offset by his need for recognition, which, together with regular undercutting of the competition, made him very unpopular with artist colleagues and employees.

In 1771 he married the Lorraine painter Gabriele Bertrand, daughter of the castle captain of Schönbrunn, drawing teacher of Archduchesses Marie Caroline and Marie Antoinette , the daughters of Maria Theresa, and one of the few female members of the academy. In 1778 he bought a house in Hietzing, later also adjacent properties.

In 1779 his two-volume copperplate engraving was published, Austria's Oddities Concerning Image and Architecture […], which contained detailed explanations with references to the mythological sources on mythology (Virgil, Ovid, Plutarch and contemporary lexicons) for the drafts he had written (and errors that were unknown at the time of these sources). After finishing work for Schönbrunn and after the death of his patron Maria Theresa in 1780, he returned to garden design. In works on German gardening and landscape design that he created from 1784 onwards , he advocated a middle ground between French and English gardening art.

Beyer's marriage to Gabriele Bertrand ended in divorce in 1785. In the same year he wrote the first known written draft for regulating the Vienna River .

Design of the Schönbrunn gardens

His most important work was an order placed by Maria Theresa in May 1773. To produce 32 (36?) Statues and a number of vases of white marble within three years for an amount of 1000 guilders each plus additional costs. As can be seen from the invoices, “per figure” was meant, for statues with two or three figures approximately the multiple was charged.

Beyer had received this order after he had succeeded in finding high-quality marble in the area around Sterzing , which was equivalent to that of Carrara , and also to find inexpensive means of transport (the desire to equip the Schönbrunn garden ground floor with marble sculptures was lacking inexpensive high-quality material had not previously been realized).

As early as the summer of 1773, Beyer was on the road with a group of 15 sculptors near Sterzing to win the blanks. According to his designs, the figures were roughly cut to size on site in order to reduce the weight for transport. In winter, the blocks were brought on sledges to Brennerstrasse, from where Tyrolean carters transported them to Hall at low cost . From there, the inexpensive waterway via Inn and Danube was possible.

In Schönbrunn he had the winter riding school (now Wagenburg ) as a studio. He himself did not do manual work there, but took on organizational and creative tasks. The sculptor who carried out the work received around half of the price of the statues, the rest was kept for design and expenditure. Beyer's employees were never allowed to sign their work, which is why in the majority of cases these are only known as Beyer's works. See the main article Sculptures and sculptures around Schönbrunn Palace .

In view of the high-quality and inexpensive material, the Krone also had the sculptures of the Innsbruck Triumphal Arch , which Johann Baptist Hagenauer had initially created out of wood and stucco , implemented in marble by Balthasar Ferdinand Moll . Marble was also given to the Elector of Bavaria in 1773 for thirteen statues that were placed in Nymphenburg Palace . From March 21, 1775 the statues were erected, presumably at the corners of the ground floor fields, as shown in the design for the large ground floor (engraving by Carl Schütz, 1772). The current arrangement came about later. Beyer had specially designed a machine for the installation.

Four groups of figures for the four fountains planned for the Great Parterre were created in 1776 (two in Beyer's studio, one at Hagenauer's, one at Zauner's), but had to be housed elsewhere due to the new arrangement in 1777: those from Beyer's studio in the ruins and in the obelisk fountain , the other two in the fountain of the main courtyard.

Beyer's last major design for Schönbrunn were the figures for the Neptune Fountain, which was completed in 1780 shortly before Maria Theresa's death .

role models

Dernjač and Schedler indicate in Beyer's peculiarities [...] textual and content-related references:

  • Bernard de Montfaucon : L'Antiquité expliquée et representée en figures . 1739
  • Joachim von Sandrart : German Academy of the Noble Building, Image and Painting Arts . 1675-1679
  • Simon Thomassin : Recueil des Figures, Groups, Thermes, Fontaines, Vases, Statues et other Ornaments de Versailles […] . Paris 1694, German: Augsburg 1710.

Honors, memberships

  • Founding member of the Académie des Arts in Stuttgart, 1761; Professorship (painting class).
  • Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna, 1760.
  • Accademia di San Luca , 1763.
  • Member of the Imperial and Royal Copper Engraving Academy 1768, from the unification to the later Academy of Fine Arts , 1772, academic counsel.
  • Academy of St. Petersburg, 1771.

Fonts

  • Austria's peculiarities regarding the art of painting and architecture . Vienna 1779.
  • Columns and water features in the Kais.-Königl. Garden at Schönbrunn, carved from marble by Wilhelm Beyer, kk Statuarius and Rath of the kk Akademie […] Vienna 1779 (several editions; Beyer gives the names of those who carried out the 24 statues completed when the work was completed in 1780).
  • The new muse or the national garden . Vienna 1784.

literature

Web links

Commons : Johann Christian Wilhelm Beyer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Constantin von Wurzbach : Beyer, Johann Wilhelm . In: Biographisches Lexikon des Kaiserthums Oesterreich . 1st part. University book printer L. C. Zamarski (formerly JP Sollinger), Vienna 1856, p. 364 ( digitized version ).
    Beyer . In: Heinrich August Pierer , Julius Löbe (Hrsg.): Universal Lexicon of the Present and the Past . 4th edition. tape 2 . Altenburg 1857, p. 712-713 ( zeno.org ). In both he is led under     Johann Wilhelm Beyer ; both give Peyer as an alternative spelling , Wurzbach also Bayer. Entries under Friedrich Wilhelm Beyer in, for example, Georg Kaspar Nagler's Neues Allgemeines Künstler-Lexikon, Vol. 1, 1835 or Meyer's Konversations-Lexikon , 1845 and others are described as incorrect by Wurzbach as early as 1856 . This is probably one of the reasons why the baroque artist appears in later encyclopedias as Wilhelm Beyer .


  2. ↑ a b lit. B. Hajós p. 36 quotes the academy and the austrian. State Archives and Oehler (1805).
  3. ↑ B. Hajós p. 29.
  4. ^ Digitized version of the bilingual edition The Hague 1723
personal data
SURNAME Beyer, Johann Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beyer, Johann Christian Wilhelm; Peyer, Johann Wilhelm; Beyer, Christoph Friedrich Wilhelm; Beyer, Christian Friedrich Wilhelm; Beyer, Friedrich Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German landscape architect, painter, sculptor and porcelain artist
DATE OF BIRTH December 27, 1725
PLACE OF BIRTH Gotha
DATE OF DEATH March 23, 1796
Place of death Hietzing