Johann Wilhelm Cordes

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Baltic Sea Beach , 1854

Johann Wilhelm Cordes (born March 14, 1824 in Lübeck ; † August 16, 1869 there ) was a German painter.

Life

Landscape at the Hemmelsdorfer See , oil sketch (1847)
Danish Post , oil on canvas (1859)

Cordes came from a merchant family; his father Johann Jochim Cordes (1782–1866) was a partner in the Lübeck trading company JG Nöltingk & Cordes , his mother Emilie Christiane, geb. Grautoff (1790–1849) was a pastor's daughter from Kirchwerder and the sister of Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff . Up to the age of 14 he attended the Katharineum in Lübeck . Although he was supposed to continue the family's commercial tradition and trained as a businessman in Wandsbek, he turned to painting at an early age. He studied first at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague , then from 1842 at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf (under Carl Friedrich Lessing and Johann Wilhelm Schirmer ) and later in Frankfurt under Jakob Becker . In 1848 he took part in the Schleswig-Holstein survey as a volunteer in the Wasmer Freikorps .

He specialized in realistic landscape painting formed by his own hiking and traveling . With Hans Fredrik Gude , whom he had met in Düsseldorf, he undertook two trips to the north in 1851 and 1853/54, whose impressions he captured in the Nordic landscapes . He also painted seascapes and beach pictures, mostly with staffage . In 1856 he returned to Lübeck from Düsseldorf. In 1859, at the request of the Grand Duke Carl Alexander von Weimar, he followed his friend Count Stanislaus von Kalckreuth to Weimar . Here was his most productive and successful time. He was appointed professor at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School (without teaching) and received the House Order of the White Falcon in 1862 .

In 1866 he took part in the main campaign in the wake of the Oldenburg Infantry Regiment No. 91 and then returned to Lübeck, sick, where he sought relaxation in Travemünde . He died in 1869 in the house of his friend, Baron von Seydlitz-Kurzbach in Lübeck.

Works

Wild Hunt , 1856/1857

Cordes kept a catalog of his pictures himself from 1854, which contained fifty entries at his death. The exhibition of his most famous picture and major work, Wilde Jagd , on which he had been working since 1856, in Berlin in 1868 attracted great attention. The monumental painting (271 cm wide, 180 cm high) was purchased from the Viennese collector Jakob Gsell for around 6,000 guilders and, after his death in 1871, was sold to a Hungarian magnate for 9,750 guilders at Georg Plach's 1872 auction . The art historian Otto Grautoff remarked on the wild hunt :

“It is a moonlight picture, conceived in a picturesque way: a battle of the pale, greenish shimmering moonlight with the night mist of the air. Nowhere is anything earthly tangible, only a few strangely twitching, dried-up branches stare ghostly up from below, without the eye being able to follow them to the trunk; and in between the frenzied hunt of the wild hunter, who storms on his devil's steed through mist and moonlight, buzzing around with all sorts of mad rabble, witchcraft, owl fluttering and believing dogs. The wild hunt is one of Cordes' main works "

- Otto Grautoff : Lübeck. P. 120

The King of Prussia acquired the last honor , the Kunsthalle Hamburg the heathland . The shipwrecked were "bought by Saint Petersburg " in 1861 ; associated with the purchase was the honorary membership in the local Imperial Academy , which in turn included the elevation to the personal nobility. The Grand Duke of Oldenburg also bought several paintings by Cordes for his collection.

estate

Cordes died unmarried and without children. His artistic estate, which included 15 paintings and around 800 oil studies, watercolors and drawings, was first inherited by his brother, the Hofrat and owner of the Alexandersbad spa, Dr. Emil Cordes (1829-1900). He bequeathed it to the Lübeck Museum, so that today there are paintings and numerous sketches in the Behnhaus in Lübeck .

Exhibitions

  • Lübeck, 1906
  • Johann Wilhelm Cordes (1824–1869). Wild hunting and wide open spaces. Behnhaus Museum, March 10 - June 30, 2013

literature

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Second museum lecture. In: Lübeckische Blätter . Volume 43, No. 50, December 15, 1901, p. 628 f. ( Text archive - Internet Archive ).
  2. ↑ a b Behnhaus shows works by Johann Wilhelm Cordes. HL-live.de, March 8, 2013, accessed September 30, 2014 .
  3. ↑ Second museum lecture. In: Lübeckische Blätter 43rd volume, No. 50, December 15, 1901, p. 629 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  4. ↑ Georg Plach: Auction of the large gallery and the other art collections of Mr. FJ Gsell, in Vienna. Vienna 1872, lot 243, p. 59 with a handwritten note about the amount of the hammer price ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  5. ^ Obituary for Emil Cordes in: Lübeckische Blätter . 42, 1900, pp. 549-551.
  6. ^ Otto Grautoff: Lübeck. Leipzig 1908, p. 116.
personal data
SURNAME Cordes, Johann Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 14, 1824
PLACE OF BIRTH Lübeck
DATE OF DEATH August 16, 1869
Place of death Lübeck