Karl Wilhelm Gropius

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl Wilhelm Gropius (also Carl Wilhelm Gropius , born April 4, 1793 in Braunschweig , † February 20, 1870 in Berlin ) was a German painter .

Life

Gropius lived in Berlin since 1802, where he first began training in a straw hat and flower factory and met Karl Friedrich Schinkel . He trained him as a landscape painter and used him for the execution of theater decorations. Gropius devoted himself to decorative painting and worked as a court theater painter for the Berlin theaters from 1819 . In 1820 he became the royal theater inspector of Berlin. He designed his first independent stage set for Franz Grillparzer's drama “ Die Ahnfrau ”. He built stage and theater decorations, according to his own but also according to Schinkel's designs in his own workshop. In 1827 he wrote the foreword to Schinkel'sDecorations at the two royal theaters in Berlin, under the general directorate of Count von Brühl, based on drawings by decorator Carl Gropius . He traveled through Germany and visited Paris several times , where he got to know the diorama invented by Louis Daguerre and Charles Marie Bouton . He brought back a number of views from Italy and Greece , which he used in his diorama, opened in 1827. In this capacity he designed, among other things, the stage sets for the world premiere of Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber for the Theater am Gendarmenmarkt . From 1833 he was a member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts . Later, panoramas were shown showing current events, such as the great fire in Hamburg in 1842 or the fire in Moscow in 1812. Together with his brothers, he founded a publishing house, a picture gallery and an art dealer.

The fruits of his travels, a collection of views from different regions, he published in 1846 in twelve issues. A collection of his ornaments in various architectural styles appeared in 1846. He also wrote jokes and purrs or painted caricatures for Flying Leaves and other notebooks.

From 1820 Gropius was married to Claudine, b. Coste (1801-1827). The family had three children; Paul, Elisabeth and Antonie. The son Paul Gropius also became a painter and his father's successor as court theater painter. The son of his daughter Antonie was the landscape painter Paul Flickel .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Paul Mahlberg: Schinkel's theater decorations . Bagel, Düsseldorf 1916, p. 22 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  2. ^ Simon Quaglio: Theater painting and stage design in the first half of the 19th century . Walter de Gruyter, 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-046064-3 , p. 32 ( books.google.de ).
  3. ↑ Angela Klein: Gropius, Carl [also Karl] Wilhelm. In: Horst-Rüdiger Jarck , Günter Scheel (ed.): Braunschweigisches Biographisches Lexikon - 19th and 20th centuries . Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 1996, ISBN 3-7752-5838-8 , p. 228 .
personal data
SURNAME Gropius, Karl Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gropius, Carl Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1793
PLACE OF BIRTH Braunschweig
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1870
Place of death Berlin