Karl Friedrich Johann von Müller

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Portrait of Johannes Fallati (1848) from the collection of the Tübingen Professorengalerie

Karl Friedrich Johann von Müller (born October 2, 1813 in Stuttgart , † April 27, 1881 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German painter .

Live and act

Karl Müller was the son of the copper engraver Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Müller . After the death of his father in 1816, his mother moved with him and his little sister from Dresden to Stuttgart and was taken into his house with the children by her father-in-law Johann Gotthard Müller . In 1822 she married the Stuttgart pastor Nathanael Köstlin for the second time , but died shortly afterwards in 1823.

In the meantime, the young Karl had been given to a preceptor (teacher of the Latin school) in Nürtingen by his grandfather , in order to evade the stimuli for art that he found in abundance in his grandfather's house and with his great-uncle Heinrich von Dannecker . The son's fate had probably frightened the caring grandfather so much that he wanted to save his grandson from a career as an artist. Later - probably after his mother remarried - Karl returned to his parents' house and found a loving tutor in his stepfather; in the end his grandfather took him in again and gave him drawing lessons in the free periods of grammar school, as Dannecker had done before. He was now allowed to pursue his inclination to become an artist and also enabled him to take painting lessons from the professor at the Stuttgart art school Johann Friedrich Dieterich .

After his grandfather's death († 1830), Müller went to Munich in 1831 to attend a regular painting school under Peter von Cornelius at the Academy of Fine Arts , studying history painting. However, he did not last the full time there, but came back to the Stuttgart art school, in order to turn to Paris in 1833 . There he joined Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres as a pupil and, under his direction, painted a “Hercules at the crossroads” and the “Farewell scene from Romeo and Juliet”, a picture that was taken in Paris with much applause and later repeated by him (a The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart owns a copy ).

When Ingres became director of the French Academy in Rome in 1837 , Müller followed him there and stayed in Rome for eleven years. He painted his best works there, two oil paintings with life-size figures, "the Oktoberfest in the Villa Borghese in Rome" (1848, engraved by Louis Martinet and distributed under the name Il Saltarello by the Parisian art dealer Charles Eugène Espidon Goupil ) and as a side piece " the Roman Carnival ”(1850), both owned by King Karl von Württemberg in the royal villa near Stuttgart-Berg . When he brought the pictures to Stuttgart, he stayed there for a while, then lived in Frankfurt for two years and then returned to Paris, which from then on he considered his real home.

Together with his educated wife Emma Friederika (* 1834), née Stumm from Neunkirchen , whom he married in 1855, he used the fortunate security of his external circumstances to build a house in Paris whose amiable hospitality is also gratefully remembered by many German compatriots was standing. Unfortunately, he no longer chose the materials for his pictures from the area of ​​modern life, which had once shown itself so grateful to him, but mostly from mythology, from which, despite all the elegance of the technology, he was unable to find an original side, neither in the View still in the painterly treatment (The Staatsgalerie Stuttgart has a “Judgment of Paris”; a “Sleeping Bacchante” was previously in private ownership in Stuttgart). On the other hand, in these pictures, as well as in the other branches of painting which he practiced, e. B. in his many study heads (drawn for Goupil & Cie in Paris and disseminated in lithography ), his oil portraits and especially in the portrait and landscape sketches, which he drew and partly colored with watercolors, the artistic inheritance of his father and grandfather extraordinary talent for drawing, unmistakably by days.

In 1867 he moved from Paris to Frankfurt, and the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 cut his relations with Paris in almost every thread for him, whom the French had long regarded as one of their own. Müller proved his attachment to his Swabian homeland by donating the 19 hand drawings of his father and grandfather that were in his possession to the royal copper engraving cabinet in Stuttgart on March 6, 1877, where they were exhibited in a special room from 1881. For this reason, Müller was raised to hereditary nobility on July 12, 1877. Out of gratitude, he donated his last oil painting "Faust and Helena" to the painting gallery founded in 1878 in the royal Rosenstein Castle near Stuttgart.

literature

Web links

Commons : Karl Friedrich Johann von Müller  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 01754 Karl Fried. Müller. In: Matriculation Book 1809–1841. Entry: May 17, 1831. (Accessed December 22, 2013).
personal data
SURNAME Müller, Karl Friedrich Johann von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Müller, Carl Friedrich Johann von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH October 2, 1813
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH April 27, 1881
Place of death Frankfurt am Main