Johann Georg Pforr

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Horse market (around 1786)
Rabbit baiting with a falconer (around 1786)

Johann Georg Pforr (born January 14, 1745 in Ulfen , † June 9, 1798 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a Hessian painter of the Goethe era . Because of his specialization in horse painting , he was called the German Wouwerman by his contemporaries .

Life

Johann Georg Pforr was the son of a tenant and initially wanted to take up his father's profession. As a result of the Seven Years' War (1756–1763) the family became impoverished. He was therefore forced to work in the Richelsdorf mines near Wildeck, where he was seriously injured when he fell into a shaft.

Porcelain painting

In the spring of 1769 he met the director of the landgrave's porcelain factory in Kassel , the secret council and chamber president Jakob-Sigismund Waitz von Eschen , to whom he presented a sample drawing with decorations for a teapot and a cup and saucer. Waitz sent her to the Kassel Porcelain Manufactory on May 9, 1769, where Pforr was employed as a porcelain painter in the summer of 1769 . In Richelsdorf, copper was extracted from slate seams , and since 1716 also nickel and cobalt , which were supplied to the Kassel porcelain factory for the manufacture of paint, among other things. Probably Pforr had something to do with the extraction of the colors, possibly even for this reason it was brought to the porcelain factory in Kassel. In the instruction to the new inspector of the Grahl Manufactory of September 15, 1769, the latter is instructed: “He [Grahl] should make the colors necessary from time to time according to his science, and here he should adhere to Mahler Forr. [= to call in] ". Pforr initially created a few decors with bird and tree motifs, in particular the decor of a teapot from the Tafel collection can be attributed to him. His later talent as a horse painter is shown above all by a pair of signed, round porcelain panels depicting red and wild boar hunting (private collection, Switzerland).

Landscape and horse painting

In June or July 1771, Pforr left the Kassel porcelain factory to return to his parents' house as an estate manager. In 1778 he attended the newly founded Art Academy in Kassel , of which he became a member a year later. Between 1780 and 1783, Landgrave Friedrich II acquired several landscape and hunting pieces from him. His talent for genre-like landscapes with animals, especially horses, cattle and dogs in the style of the Dutch painting of Philips Wouwerman, Paulus Potter and others is fully developed in these paintings. In 1781 Pforr moved to Frankfurt am Main . The youngest uncle of his future wife, Anton Wilhelm Tischbein , had been court painter to the Hereditary Prince Wilhelm in nearby Hanau since 1769 . In Frankfurt there was a prospect of being able to sell his pictures well. Already during his time at the Kassel academy he had "for the sake of earning money, enticed by the wishes of many foreigners, [...] created views of Kassel and [Castle] Weissenstein ."

In 1784 Pforr married Johanna Christiane Tischbein. The couple had two children, Heinrich, who died in 1801 at the age of 16, and Franz Pforr .

In his time in Frankfurt until his death in 1798, Pforr seems to have concentrated almost exclusively on his favorite discipline, horse painting; Landscapes and other paintings can hardly be traced after 1781, probably because the landscape subject in Frankfurt was introduced by his friend Christian Georg Schütz the Elder. Ä. was occupied. According to older sources, Pforr is said to have enlivened his painting with staffage figures. There was no representation of horses in painting as an autonomous discipline until the second half of the 18th century. However, they were an important part of portraits of rulers, battle paintings, landscape paintings or even princely hunts. While the depictions of horses were more of an accessory here, they move so much into the center of the thematically basically no different paintings by Philips Wouwerman (1619–1668) that they are becoming more and more the real topic. Compared to his Dutch predecessor, Pforr's paintings document a change in horse breeding: the stocky, powerful, often piebald horses of the Baroque period, suitable for the jumps, turns and capers of the high school , which is oriented towards the requirements of the military , are the horses of the so-called Campagne - Riding gave way for travel and hunting.

Works

In addition to oil paintings, there are occasional gouaches by him on the art market . He also created a series of engravings on horse breeds and horse dressage. The Städel in Frankfurt, the Neue Galerie Kassel and the Fasanerie Palace near Fulda keep paintings by Johann Georg Pforr .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to the church book of Sontra-Ulfen, Pforr was baptized on January 17, 1745 and born on January 14, not January 4, as is stated in other biographies and the ADB.
  2. ↑ Ducret, Porzellanmanufaktur Kassel , 1960, pp. 97 and 104.
  3. ↑ Fig. AK Kasseler Porzellan, 1980, p. 67.
  4. ^ Hermann Knackfuß , Kunstakademie Kassel, 1908, p. 41.
personal data
SURNAME Pforr, Johann Georg
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German animal painter
DATE OF BIRTH January 14, 1745
PLACE OF BIRTH Ulfen
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 1798
Place of death Frankfurt am Main