Joseph von Deym

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Joseph Nepomuk Franz de Paula Count von Deym Freiherr von Střítež , alias Joseph Müller (born April 4, 1752 in Wognitz , † January 27, 1804 in Prague ) was a Bohemian nobleman, patron of art and music, wax maker and the founder of the art gallery of the court statuary Müller in his own Palais Deym in Vienna .

Life

Joseph Nepomuk Franz de Paula Count von Deym Freiherr von Střítež was born in 1752 as the son of Bernhard Wenzel Deym von Střítež (1704–1758) and Maria Anna Malovec von Malovic (1715–1769) on the family estate in the Bohemian town of Wognitz.

In 1780, while doing military service, he killed a rival in a duel and had to leave Vienna. In exile in Holland he took the name Joseph Müller and made his way as a wax boss and a successful art dealer. Around 1790 he returned to Vienna under the assumed name Joseph Müller and opened a public gallery of curiosities at Stock-im-Eisen-Platz N ° 610. In March 1791 he opened a memorial for the person who had died the previous year in Himmelspfortengasse in the house of Mr. Gerl General Laudon. Mozart composed the Fantasie KV 594 especially for this exhibition. The quality of the completely lifelike wax figures provided Joseph von Deym with commissions from the imperial family and the appointment to court statuary. In 1793, together with the sculptor and wax boss Leonhard Posch (1750–1831), he made wax portraits of the imperial family, which were intended as gifts for royal relatives in Naples. Between 1793 and 1795 Joseph von Deym alias Müller and Leonhard Posch stayed in Naples and made counterparts for the Viennese imperial family. In the Museo Borbonico in Naples and Rome, Joseph von Deym copied old masters and made casts of important antiquities, to which he got the much talked about access due to his good relations with Queen Maria Carolina . When he returned to Vienna, he built an expanded cabinet of wax figures, curiosities and music, which he set up in 1797 in the Palais Deym built by Johann Nepomuk Amann near the Red Tower. It showed sculptures by Georg Raphael Donner and Franz Xaver Messerschmidt , casts of antiquities and originals, life-size wax figures of important personalities as well as mythological and sometimes erotic arrangements, with music boxes and slot machines creating a multimedia effect. A life-size equestrian sculpture of Franz II was made by Joseph von Deym himself. The public art gallery of Hofstatuarius Müller passed to the widow after Joseph Deym's death and remained open until 1819. The collection was then dissolved.

Joseph von Deym loved contemporary music. He was particularly interested in Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven . In 1790 Mozart composed two pieces for Deym's music automatons, the Fantasias KV 594 and KV 608 for organ drum. Joseph Deym made the lost waxy death mask of Mozart himself from a plaster cast.

There was a special relationship with Beethoven, as the aging Count married Beethoven's muse and lover Countess Josephine Brunsvik de Korompa in 1799 . Even after his marriage, Beethoven had free access to the Palais Deym, where he premiered a number of compositions. Beethoven composed pieces for a music box for Deym.

From the marriage of Joseph von Deym to Josephine Brusvik there were four children. On January 27, 1804, Joseph von Deym died in Prague of pneumonia .

The wax sculptures of Joseph von Deyms

Joseph von Deym and Leonhard Posch: portrait bust of Ferdinand IV., 1793

In the 18th century, the highly valued art of embossing, which was already common in antiquity, reached its peak. In the 19th and even more so in the 20th century it was displaced into panoptics and only retained a recognized status in the special form of medical moulage until the 1950s. According to the sources, Joseph von Deym can be assigned several life-size large sculptures as independent works, among which the lost equestrian sculpture of Emperor Franz II as well as the wax figure of General Gideon Ernst von Laudon, which has been missing since 1962 , are to be regarded as main works. In the kuk Familien-Fideikommißbibliothek in Vienna, there are strikingly lifelike portrait busts of Ferdinand I of Naples and Emperor Leopold II , which Julius von Schlosser Joseph von Deym already attributed. Schlosser referred to the artistically excellent execution in this technique, which today (1900) was hit by the curse of aesthetics. Since Joseph von Deym was accompanied by Leonhard Posch on his trip to Naples in 1793, Leonhard Posch is a possible co-author. The portrait bust of Leopold II was extensively restored in 2002.

Joseph von Deym also made waxy death masks from plaster casts. The most important were the death masks of Joseph II and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The whereabouts of the latter remains unclear despite decades of speculation.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Julius von Schlosser: Dead Views: History of portrait painting in wax; an attempt / Julius von Schlosser . Edited by Thomas Medicus. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-05-002408-9 , p. 81
  2. ↑ Palais Deym at Planet Vienna
  3. ↑ Julius von Schlosser: Dead Views: History of portrait painting in wax; an attempt / Julius von Schlosser . Edited by Thomas Medicus. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-05-002408-9 , p. 95
  4. ↑ Julius von Schlosser: Dead Views: History of portrait painting in wax; an attempt / Julius von Schlosser . Edited by Thomas Medicus. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-05-002408-9 , p. 80 f.
  5. ↑ bildarchivaustria.at
  6. ↑ Hans Bankl, Johann Szilvássy: Stories of Mozart's death mask . In: The relics of Mozart: skull and death mask . facultas.wuv, Maudrich, 1992, p. 79 ff.
personal data
SURNAME Deym, Joseph von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Müller, Joseph; Müller-Deym, Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Bohemian nobleman, wax artist, music patron and owner of a Viennese art and curiosity gallery
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1752
PLACE OF BIRTH Wognitz
DATE OF DEATH January 27, 1804
Place of death Prague