Johann Jacob Höppli
Johann Jakob Höppli (* 1822 in the canton of Thurgau , Switzerland ; † 1876 in Wiesbaden ) was a Swiss sculptor and ceramics producer .
Life
Johann Jakob Höppli was born in 1822 into a family of millers in the canton of Thurgau , Switzerland . He was originally supposed to learn stonemason with the ulterior motive that one of the sons could replace the millstones of his parents' business himself. In 1841 he finished his apprenticeship as a modeller and sculptor and went on trips and wanderings. He studied art sculpture for a year in Carrara, Italy and also attended the Schinkelsche Bauakademie in Berlin. Around 1846 his wandering took him to Wiesbaden , where the ducal-Nassau master builder Philipp Hoffmann noticed him, who was commissioned by Duke Adolf von Nassau to build a monument for his wife, the Russian Princess Elisabeth Michailowna Romanowa , who died early : the Russian Chapel - one of today's landmarks in Wiesbaden.
Höppli received his first major order and produced models and molds for ceramic decorations, for which he bought into the " Faience - Leicher Manufactory " in Dotzheimer Straße in 1848 , where he was first a modeller and then a partner. With his marriage to the respected family of master carpenter Christian Gaab in 1860, he also got easier access to private builders.
Höppli designed the portal of the market church from baked clay , its cornices and finial flowers in a particularly splendid way . After the Russian Chapel, the Markt, Bonifatius and Geisenheim churches , Höppli had decorated houses of worship in all major Christian churches. In 1863 a Jewish house of worship was added, the synagogue on Michelsberg . Again, the master builder Philipp Hoffmann, who was in charge of the construction of the synagogue, commissioned him to take care of the decoration of the building.
Independence and construction of the Höppli house
During this time, Höppli separated from the Leicher faience factory and founded his own "workshop with kiln" next to his house on Dotzheimer Straße. In 1867 he received an award at the Paris World's Fair for a multi-tiered fountain decorated with tritons and dolphins , which also earned him international attention. In 1868 the company in Dotzheimer Strasse was expanded again to include workshop buildings behind it. Another possibility of expansion arose for Höppli with the directly adjacent Wörthstraße, which was created as a connection between Rheinstraße and Dotzheimer Straße. He decided on a representative front building, which he implemented from 1873 with the just 26-year-old Georg Friedrich Fürstchen .
The Höppli-Haus should not only be representative and show what was produced there based on its facade, but also offer additional exhibition space. The architect Fürstchen achieved this with a trick that was quite unique for Wiesbaden: he set a green inner courtyard as a front garden facing the street, literally wedged between the high, magnificent buildings of the four-winged complex and bordered it decoratively with four caryatids , which until a few years ago carried a pergola from the Street off. The buildings were completely decorated with tiles, columns, gable motifs and blind blocks, the abundance of architectural accessories and ornamental decorative elements inside and especially outside should be unique in Wiesbaden.
Death and fate of family and company
Johann Jakob Höppli did not see the completion of the new factory. In 1876 he died unexpectedly at the age of 54. He left two daughters who both became teachers and his 12-year-old son Christian. With the help of Christian Gaab, his widow was able to continue running the company until his son's training as a ceramic engineer was completed in 1892, even if the company suffered additional setbacks from the economic shocks of the early days and only a third of the original workforce could be employed.
At the turn of the century, major orders, such as the construction of the New Kurhaus , the theater foyer , the state library and the state museum , but also the replacement of the weathered sandstone figures on the rotunda of the Biebrich castle with more durable clay ones , ensured the company's existence. With the First World War , the Wiesbaden building boom and thus also the demand for decorative elements largely died down, and Johann Jakob Höppli's descendants produced technical ceramics such as insulators and semiconducting materials for electrical engineering , but also coils for the first electric irons.
Until the end of the Second World War , production continued in the workshops and ultimately hundreds of villas in the city center, but also numerous bourgeois houses in the suburbs and many tombs, were furnished with ornaments, ornaments and set pieces from the Höppli company. With the death of Christian Höppli, who was killed in one of the last air raids in Biebrich in 1945 , production in Wörthstraße ended. The chimney was put down in 1946. The workshops converted into living space. The open round arches to the workshop and exhibition room were walled up. The two large round ovens in the back of the cellar are still preserved today, but some of them have been filled with rubble. The side cellars, which served as storage for coal and clay, with pouring from above from the inner courtyard, still exist.
Johann Jacob Höppli's tomb, on the other hand, was destroyed out of “ignorance of Wiesbaden handicrafts and lack of monument protection” when the old cemetery was converted into a park and the figures that were to be preserved were damaged.
estate
Part of the artistic and personal estate of Johann Jakob Höppli and his factory is still in the private ownership of his descendants today, while another part was transferred to the Wiesbaden City Museum. A large number of terracottas from the company's production in different states of preservation are still stored unsecured in the basement of the State Office for Monument Preservation Hesse in Biebrich Castle . Since 2018, the non-profit association of the German Research Center for Historicism has endeavored to recover this part of the artistic estate, to prepare it for conservation purposes and to exhibit it to the public on a long-term basis.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Berthold Bubner: The Terracotta by Johann Jacob Höppli, A Contribution to Wiesbadener Baukultur, Wiesbaden International 11/1987, p. 11 ff.
- ↑ Mario Bohrmann: Das Höppli-Haus, Zierrat für Wiesbaden In: lilienjournal, Wiesbadener Stadtansichten , p. 15, October 17, 2016, online as Das Höppli-Haus - the ornament factory
- ↑ Mario Bohrmann: Das Höppli-Haus, Zierrat für Wiesbaden In: lilienjournal, Wiesbadener Stadtansichten , October 17, 2016, online as Das Höppli-Haus - the ornament factory
- ^ Wiesbadener Kurier: Wiesbaden should become the center of historicism
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Höppli, Johann Jacob |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Höppli, Johann Jakob |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swiss sculptor and ceramic producer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 1822 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Canton of Thurgau , Switzerland |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1876 |
| Place of death | Wiesbaden |