Karl Wedekind

Karl Wedekind (born August 16, 1809 in Melle ; † October 5, 1881 in Hanover ) was a German - Italian oil importer and banker who also acted as a patron .

Life

Karl Wedekind worked for the trading company F. Gruber & Co. in Genoa from 1830 to 1838 , and most recently managed the branch in Palermo . There he founded the trading house Carlo Wedekind & Co. , which initially traded in manufactured goods , tropical fruits, salt and sulfur , but shifted its business to oil imports and banking in the years after 1860. The banking house was one of the most important private banks in Palermo and Rome - there in Palazzo Wedekind opposite the Marc Aurel column . A monopoly position could be achieved in the oil trade for southern Italy . Business contacts were established with the Standard Oil Company as early as 1873/74 , which, after the death of Karl Wedekind in 1891, resulted in the establishment of the SIAP “Societa Italo-Americana pel Petrolio” (later Esso Italiana). Its first chairman of the board of directors was his son Consul General Paul Wedekind.

Karl Wedekind, Hanoverian consul in Palermo until 1866, was in close contact with numerous artists of his time, from whom he acquired works or whom he commissioned with work. In 1858 , Arnold Böcklin received his first major commission from Wedekind to paint the dining room of a villa in Hanover. Wedekind also acquired numerous pictures from Böcklin, such as Faun and Nymphe , Germanic tribes on boar hunting and their serenades for children . The contact to Böcklin had been arranged by Anselm Feuerbach , from whom Wedekind had also bought a picture for children (today in the Museum of Fine Arts in Leipzig) and other pictures with children as a subject. From Wilhelm von Kaulbach , he acquired, among other works, the now lost painting The Conversion of the Saxon Duke Widukind . He had Conrad Wilhelm Hase undertake the construction of his Villa Glitzerburg in Kassel in 1870 , after the architect Wilhelm Lüer , a former student of Hase, had died shortly before.

Awards

Silver Cross of the Guelph Order

family

Wedekind, who belongs to the Wedekind zur Horst family , which also includes the writer Frank Wedekind , was married to Julie Ehmbsen , and after her death to Marie Charlotte Weyermann , the daughter of the Elberfeld councilor and dyework owner . His son-in-law was the Prussian finance minister Johannes von Miquel . His son Robert married a daughter of the Justice Council Friedrich Crome , a lawyer at the Imperial Court in Leipzig, and the niece of Werner von Siemens . Another son, Benno, was married to the daughter of Ludwig Ganghofer . The descendants of his son Paul were raised to the hereditary Prussian nobility. One grandson married the daughter of the diplomat Edgar Haniel von Haimhausen , another grandson the daughter of the German oil importer Franz Ernst Schütte , and one granddaughter married General Ferdinand von Bredow, who was murdered in 1934 . Of Wedekind's great-grandchildren, the resistance fighter Rudolf von Scheliha and the journalist Caspar Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing became known.

Individual evidence

German Gender Book Vol. 187, p. 560 with illustration
Giorgio Carpaneto: I Palazzi di Roma. Rome 2004, ISBN 88-541-0207-5
C. Heilmann: "Italy lies in ourselves" - the art of the German-Romans. Hirmer, Munich 1987, pp. 120, 178, 234 f., 384
Arnold Böcklin 1827-1901. Catalog for the exhibition for the 150th birthday, Basel 1977, p. 17, 165 ff.
Wolfgang Brönner : The bourgeois villa in Germany 1830–1890. Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, Worms 1994, pp. 181–183, images of the Glitzerburg pp. 343–347

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Wedekind, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Wedekind zur Horst, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German-Italian merchant and consul of Hanover
DATE OF BIRTH	August 16, 1809
PLACE OF BIRTH	Melle
DATE OF DEATH	October 5, 1881
Place of death	Hanover