Johann Georg Edlinger

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Self-Portrait, 1786

Johann Georg Edlinger (also Johann Georg von Edlinger , born March 1, 1741 in Graz , † September 15, 1819 in Munich ) was an Austrian portrait painter who worked in Munich. Its importance as a portraitist of his time in the southern half of the German-speaking area is undisputed .

Life

Johann Georg Edlinger was the son of the gardener Josef Edlinger and his wife Therese. His creative abilities were recognized early on and Edlinger received his first artistic lessons at the Latin school in his hometown. Around 1752 he became an apprentice to the Graz church painter Embert. At the age of 17 he left his teacher's workshop and spent the next three years wandering through Austria and Hungary. Then he returned to Graz.

In 1765 he went to Vienna and worked there in the studio of the painter Tuchmeyer. Through his connections, Edlinger came to Munich at the end of 1774 at the Royal Drawing School and became a pupil of the court painter Franz Ignaz Oefele . In contrast to Vienna, where Edlinger was more committed to the Rococo , he now saw his role model in the work of the Swedish painter George de Marées .

Edlinger developed the style of the late Marée further; the climax of this endeavor was a portrait of Elisabeth Auguste von der Pfalz , wife of Elector Karl Theodor . But it was not until 1781 that Edlinger was appointed "royal Bavarian court painter". As such, Edlinger soon received orders from the courts in Mannheim , Stuttgart a . v. a.

Edlinger married Maria Anna Barbara Welser in Munich in 1775 and had six children with her. However, his ideal of realistic portraiture brought him into economic difficulties over time. After the so-called Sturm und Drang period was replaced by classicism , the demand for unvarnished portraits fell rapidly, and Edlinger was too "headstrong" to adapt to this change. At the age of 78 he died on September 15, 1819 in Munich in deep poverty.

Although Edlinger, as a representative of classicism , surpassed colleagues such as Andreas Seidl , Joseph Hauber or Caspar Gerhard Klotz , he is very close to Johann Georg von Dillis in landscape painting . Lorenz Westenrieder praised Edlinger for his realistic tendencies as "... undisputedly the best portrait painter in Germany".

The tomb of Edlinger is on the old southern cemetery in Munich (burial ground 12 - row 11 - 46th) Location .

In 2015, the Münchner Stadtmuseum received 27 Edlinger portraits from the estate of the collector Hans G. Knäusel on permanent loan. A monograph on the painter is in preparation by Brigitte Huber from the Munich City Archives.

The "Edlinger Mozart"

“Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791); um 1790. "(official title according to the inventory catalog of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie since 2002) ( detail )

Johann Georg Edlinger probably created a portrait in Munich in 1790 , which was listed in the catalog of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie until 2002 under the title “Herr im green tailcoat”. Since 2002 the official title of the inventory catalog has been “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791); around 1790 ". The art historian Rolf Schenk discovered this work while researching his dissertation in the depot of the Berlin Gemäldegalerie and was sure to attribute it to Edlinger. In 1995 Wolfgang Seiller , a descendant of Edlinger, noticed a resemblance between the person depicted and the one in WA Mozart's Bologna portrait, the authenticity of which has been proven. A report on this was published in the Mozart Yearbook in 2000. Rolf Schenk, who has since become the leading Edlinger expert in the field of art history, confirmed the Mozart assignment in 2005. Martin Braun (2006) showed in a statistical study of facial features that the portrait shows the same person as in the famous Mozart portrait in Bologna with a probability of 10,000,000 to one.

Richard Bauer, on the other hand, put forward the view that this was a portrait of the merchant and Munich city councilor Joseph Anton Steiner (1753–1813).

In 2006 the assignment to Mozart was confirmed by four well-known art historians at the Austrian State Gallery in Vienna, namely Gerbert Frodl, Sabine Grabner, Michael Krapf, and Udo Felbinger. The alternative hypothesis of the Kaufmann assignment has not yet been supported by any art historian, which is no longer to be expected in the future since Braun and Michaelis found out in 2006 that it was based on a technical mistake. Finally, through a find in a private archive, Seiller was able to prove that the “Kaufmann-Steiner portrait” recorded in an old photograph represents a completely different person and has nothing to do with the portrait in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie.

At the suggestion of Wolfgang Seiller, the sculptor Wolfgang Eckert created a series of Mozart heads between 2005 and 2006, based on the intention of transforming Edlinger's two-dimensional representation into a fully three-dimensional space. Eckert's portrait studies were created taking into account all representations of Mozart that were considered authentic and were created during his lifetime.

Eckert saw this project as an important addition to Braun's biometric research. His starting point was to examine the comparative objects to be researched as a result of artistic processes, also using artistic methods. This is mainly because an artistic exaggeration of nature, but also commissioned idealization pressures to which historical portraitists may have been exposed, could lead to conditions that would not be accessible with purely scientific or art-historical procedures.

During his project work, Eckert came to the conclusion that the silver pen drawing made by Dora Stock in 1789, which shows Mozart in profile, shows the most significant correspondence with Edlinger's painting, and that this graphic in particular would substantiate the ascription of a picture of Mozart created by Edlinger.

literature

to the Mozart portrait
  • Rainer Michaelis, Wolfgang Seiller: An unknown portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. In: Mozart Yearbook 1999 of the Central Institute for Mozart Research of the International Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2000, pp. 1–12.
  • Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, Rainer Michaelis (Ed.): The German paintings of the 18th century. Critical inventory catalog. Berlin 2002, pp. 82–85 Cat.-No. 2097.
  • Wolfgang Seiller: New Findings on the Portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the Berlin Picture Gallery. In: Mozart Yearbook 2005 of the Academy for Mozart Research of the International Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2006, pp. 245–252.
  • Martin Braun: The last portrait of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A biometric-statistical comparison. In: Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Hrsg.): The Mozart portrait in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin 2006, pp. 19–22 ( online ).
  • Richard Bauer : The "Berlin Mozart". Necessary opposition to a world sensation. In: Acta Mozartiana. Born in 2005 ( PDF ( Memento from February 6, 2006 in the Internet Archive )).
  • Volker Hagedorn: Is it Mozart or not? In: The time . June 9, 2005.
  • Ute Stehr: The restoration of the painting. In: Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Hrsg.): The Mozart portrait in the Berlin Gemäldegalerie. National Museums in Berlin Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin 2006, pp. 23–31.
  • Sabine Grabner, Michael Krapf (ed.): Enlightened Bourgeois - portraits from Gainsborough to Waldmüller 1750-1840. Hirmer, Munich 2006.
  • Martin Braun, Rainer Michaelis: "Edlinger Mozart" and "Edlinger Steiner" are two portraits: compelling technical evidence. ( PDF ).
  • Wolfgang Seiller: Clarification in the dispute over the Edlinger portrait. In: Mozart Yearbook 2012 of the Academy for Mozart Research of the International Mozarteum Foundation Salzburg. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2014, pp. 289–296.

Web links

Commons : Johann Georg Edlinger  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wilhelm Schmidt:  Edlinger, Johann Georg . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1877, p. 648.
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Eckert: About the Getalt / A work report . Design Concepts Verlag, St. Märgen 2006, ISBN 3-9807059-5-1 .
personal data
SURNAME Edlinger, Johann Georg
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Etlinger, Josef Georg von; Ettlinger, Josef Georg von; Endlinger, Johann Georg; Edlinger, Josef Georg von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian portrait painter, active in Munich
DATE OF BIRTH March 1, 1741
PLACE OF BIRTH Graz
DATE OF DEATH September 15, 1819
Place of death Munich