Ludwig von Gleichen-Sootworm
Heinrich Ludwig Freiherr von Gleichen-Rußwurm (born October 25, 1836 at Greifenstein Castle in Bonnland / Lower Franconia , † July 9, 1901 in Weimar ) was a painter and graphic artist of German impressionism . He was the pioneer of this art direction in Germany. Landscapes were one of his favorite subjects . Gleichen-Rußwurm is the grandson of Friedrich Schiller .
Life
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Heinrich Ludwig Freiherr von Gleichen-Rußwurm was born on October 25, 1836 at Greifenstein Castle in the former municipality of Bonnland (now a village in the area of the Hammelburg military training area , Bad Kissingen district ) as the only child of Baron Adalbert von Gleichen-Rußwurm and his wife Emilie , the youngest daughter of Friedrich von Schiller was born. The Bavarian King Ludwig I took over the sponsorship of the "grandson of his favorite poet" .
Ludwig von Gleichen-Rußwurm first attended school in Meiningen , where his father sat after his election as a representative of the knighthood in the state parliament of the Duchy of Saxony-Meiningen and where the family spent the winter months. The absence during the winter due to the inadequate heatability of Greifenstein Castle, the family later spent in Würzburg . The parents had rented an apartment there in what was then the unicorn pharmacy so that Ludwig could go to the neighboring high school. He completed this with the school-leaving exam and studied in Jena , Heidelberg and Geneva . He then attended the agricultural academy in Hohenheim near Stuttgart and completed an internship.
During a stay in Frankfurt am Main , he met Baroness Elisabeth von Thienen-Adlerflycht , the daughter of the Danish chargé d'affaires at the German Imperial Council . The two married in 1859. On November 6th, 1865 their son Alexander was born, who later made a name for himself as a writer and cultural philosopher. The child's mother died shortly after the birth on December 10, 1865 and was buried in the family vault at the Bonnland cemetery. The son Alexander was handed over to the care of his grandmother Emilie von Gleichen-Rußwurm, who took over his upbringing and shaped him significantly.
Ludwig von Gleichen-Rußwurm, who had already felt his talent for painting during his school and study years, gave himself up to his artistic inclinations after the death of his wife. As a noble dilettante, he moved into an apartment with a studio in Weimar in 1869, which Grand Duke Carl Alexander of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach made available to him. There he studied landscape painting under Max Schmidt at the Grand Ducal Saxon Art School directed by Stanislaus von Kalckreuth , and from 1871 under Theodor Hagen . In 1872 he took part in an exhibition in Berlin for the first time .
During a stay in France in 1876, he was influenced by the Barbizon School , which, with its turn to realistic depictions of nature, turned away from the classic, idealistic style, met his ideas and which also became groundbreaking for the Weimar art school. Albert Brendel , who has been working at the Weimar School since 1875 , also encouraged him to use the etching technique. The landscape painter Karl Buchholz exerted a not insignificant influence on von Gleichen-Rußwurm, who was one of the pioneers of German Impressionism . He eventually developed into one of the first German landscape painters who brought the artistic impulses of French Impressionism to Germany, alongside the aforementioned teachers from the Weimar art school, as well as Christian Rohlfs and Paul Wilhelm Tübbecke .
From 1880 von Gleichen-Rußwurm spent the winter months in Berlin and undertook trips to France and Italy in the following years , among which the multiple stays at the seaside on Helgoland , in Scheveningen , Blankenberge and Trouville became of particular importance for his artistic work. Together with his son Alexander, he donated extensive legacies of the poet to the Goethe Archive in Weimar from the collection of the Schiller Museum set up by his grandmother at Schloss Greifenstein, so that from 1889 the archive was named “Goethe and Schiller Archive” . The Goethe Society awarded him honorary membership for this. Five years later he became chairman of the German Schiller Foundation .
Ludwig von Gleichen-Rußwurm died on July 9, 1901 in Weimar. He was buried next to his wife and his mother, who died in 1872, in the family vault at the Bonnland cemetery.
Picturesque work
Was published by Gleichen-Rußwurm in the Biographical Artist Lexicon by Dr. Hermann Alexander Müller, still described as an artist who paints “atmospheric, often all too crude natural landscapes with characteristic staffage” , his first stay in France can be considered a point in time for his artistic development in the sense of the suggestions received there. The small watercolor study “May 1876 Forest of Fontainbleu” also dates from this period. A few years later there was a direct encounter with the painters of Barbizon. In his endeavor to capture the motif and the coloring in the most natural way possible, he saw parallels to his own point of view in the Barbizon school , which strengthened his view. Von Gleichen-Rußwurm was looking for an immediate and intensely felt reproduction of nature and people. Generously combined forms with clear contrasts between light and dark are powerfully structured. The color spectrum ranged from a great variety to a reduction to light and dark silhouettes. In addition to landscape painting as a focus, he also painted urban scenes. In the field of etching technique he was active in episodes. In a later creative phase, lithographs were made with chalk or ink and brush.
The paintings “Peasant couple at the hay harvest” and “Plowing farmer” from 1889 were the first to deal with French Impressionism. For the depiction of motifs with varying lighting conditions, so valued in French Impressionism, the rolling hills around his birthplace Bonnland provided and the park of Schloss Greifenstein, an inexhaustible reservoir of inspiration in the change of the day and the seasons.
Julius Meier-Graefe wrote in his "History of the Development of Modern Art" from 1904: "Gleichen-Rußwurm first accomplished the introduction of Impressionism into German painting on his own." His son Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm expressed the fact that he polarized in his time when he wrote: "His pictures arouse enthusiastic approval on the one hand, and the sharpest rejection on the other."
Works in museums (selection)
- National Gallery (Berlin)
- Kupferstichkabinett Dresden
- Museum in the Kulturspeicher
- Hamburger Kunsthalle
- Weimar art collections, now the Weimar Classic Foundation
- National Museum of Wroclaw
literature
- E. Benezit: Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs. Volume 14 and 14, p. 249 and 250 Nouv. ed. - Paris: Gründ.
- Heiner Dikreiter : Art and artists in Mainfranken. A contribution to Main Franconian art in the 19th and 20th centuries . Mainfränkische Hefte 18, Würzburg 1954
- Heiner Dikreiter: Freiherr von Gleichen-Rußwurm . Catalog of the memorial exhibition, Würzburg 1957
- Städtische Galerie Würzburg (ed.): Ludwig von Gleichen-Rußwurm . Exhibition from December 18, 1983 to February 19, 1984, Würzburg 1983
- The impressionist Ludwig von Gleichen-Rußwurm in the 2008 yearbook of the Arnsteiner Heimatkunde-Verein eV, Arnstein 2008, ISBN 3-931586-18-9
- Elfriede Bäck / Marina Scheinost: Ludwig von Gleichen-Rußwurm: The Schillerenkel brings Impressionism to Franconia , in Franconia 1995, Würzburg, p. 248 ff. ( Online )
- Nico Kirchberger, Ludwig von Gleichen-Russwurm. "The first German impressionist", in: Ders. (Ed.), Impressionism black / white, exhibition cat. Museum in the Kulturspeicher Würzburg, Munich a. Berlin 2016, pp. 114–117, ISBN 978-3-422-07379-1
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Same-sootworm, Ludwig von |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Gleichen-Rußwurm, Heinrich Ludwig Freiherr von (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German impressionist painter and graphic artist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | October 25, 1836 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Bonnland |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 9, 1901 |
| Place of death | Weimar |