Karl Friedrich Fries

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl Friedrich Fries (born November 21, 1831 in Winnweiler (then Bavarian Rhine Palatinate), † December 23, 1871 in St. Gallen ) was a German painter of the 19th century.

Artistic career

The son of the local pharmacist showed a talent for drawing at the age of ten. Encouraged by his grandfather, doctor and landowner from Alsenborn , he began to try to color his drawings . When his parents moved to Munich with him and his younger sister in 1845, the father refused to finance his training as a painter at what is now the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich after graduating from school in 1849 . That's why Fries began studying philosophy . In the Alte Pinakothek, while copying Titian's Karl V, he met the idiosyncratic painter Johann Baptist Berdellé , who ran a private school in Munich. He managed to convince his father and so from 1851 Fries attended the Berdellés painting school. In 1853 Fries continued his training with Carl Rahl in Vienna. In the spring of 1856 he toured Italy.

Stay in Italy

First he copied the old Renaissance masters in Venice , including the Assunta (Assumption of Mary) by Titian (this painting was acquired by Count Schack for his collection after his death). There he met Anselm Feuerbach , with whom he had a long friendship. In Florence , Fries met the poet of the Risorgimento , Countess Laura Beatrice Mancini , the wife of Count Pasquale Stanislao Mancini , who later became Italian Foreign Minister. He often used her as a model and she was considered his "unfulfilled love".

After a stay in Calabria, he went to Rome in December 1856, where he and Feuerbach were accepted into the German Art Association. During his three-year stay there, Karl Friedrich Fries belonged to the circle of the German Romans . He met many artists, including Arnold Böcklin , Franz von Lenbach and the Nazarene Friedrich Overbeck . The years of his stay in Italy in particular had left deep marks on the artist, as his relationship with Countess Mancini had inadvertently got him caught up in the turmoil of the underground struggle for a united Italy.

return

In 1860 he returned to Munich and opened a studio there. Due to an illness in his youth, Fries suffered from depression. Finally, on December 23, 1871, he committed suicide in St. Gallen, Switzerland . His grave is in the now abandoned southern cemetery in Munich.

Works

Fries mainly painted numerous genre and portrait pictures with scenes from Italian country life, but also mythological and historical pictures. Fries' pictures are characterized by a fresh colorism. For the Bavarian National Museum in Munich (now the Museum of Five Continents ), he painted the fresco Bavaria receives the electorate back , which was destroyed in the Second World War. Most of his pictures are in unknown free float or have been lost in the chaos of the war. The fact that the artist, like so many of his contemporaries, usually did not sign his pictures, makes it even more difficult to record the work .

Some works (selection)

  • The Lorelei - oil on canvas, 199 × 97 cm - 1857 (Historisches Museum der Pfalz in Speyer)
  • The Lute Player - oil on wood, 1858 (private property)
  • Wine, women and song - oil on canvas, 1860 (private property)
  • Fountain scene in Antrodoco - oil on canvas, 1860 (private property)

See also

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Max Leitschuh: The matriculations of the upper classes of the Wilhelmsgymnasium in Munich , 4 vol., Munich 1970–1976; Vol. 4, p. 47.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Fries, Karl Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 21, 1831
PLACE OF BIRTH Winnweiler
DATE OF DEATH December 23, 1871
Place of death St. Gallen