Matthias Gottfried Eichler

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View of the Kremlin in Moscow: an engraving from the Russian prospectuses by Matthias Gottfried Eichler after a picture by Gérard de la Barthe

Matthias Gottfried Eichler (born February 4, 1748 in Erlangen , † June 19, 1821 in Augsburg ) was a German draftsman and engraver . After his training (until 1773) he worked in Switzerland for the first few years and decades , then from 1805 until the end of his life in Augsburg.

Streak of life

Matthias Gottfried Eichler came from a family of artists. His grandfather, Gottfried Eichler the Elder (1676–1759), and his father, Gottfried Eichler the Younger (1715–1770), both of whom worked mainly in Augsburg, were already painters and engravers. Matthias Gottfried received his first training from his father, then from the painter and engraver Georg Philipp Rugendas the Younger (1701–1774) and the copper engraver Johann Gottfried Thelott (1711–1775).

In 1767 he left Augsburg and went to Mannheim , where he continued his training with Aegidius Verhelst at the electoral drawing school and graduated in 1773.

Marat is stabbed to death by Charlotte Corday : re-engraving of a French picture of the revolution by Eichler from 1816 after Jacques François Joseph Swebach-Desfontaines

In 1774 Matthias Gottfried Eichler received a call from Christian von Mechel (1737-1817), who at the time was busy with a larger work in Basel , the so-called Düsseldorfer Galeriewerk , with which the then director of the Düsseldorf Art Academy , Lambert Krahe (1712 –1790). For this work Eichler copied and engraved pictures of the old masters together with von Mechel (and probably some other engravers), such as the Last Judgment by Peter Paul Rubens . After completing the gallery in 1778, he went to Bern , where he worked for booksellers and, among others, mostly by Balthasar Anton Dunker (1746–1807), whom he had probably met at Christian von Mechel's, etched panels depicting alpine landscapes by Caspar Wolf (1735–1783), or also pictures by Jakob Philipp Hackert (1737–1807) such as the Quatra vues de Livourne (Four Views of Livorno). - In 1783 Matthias Gottfried Eichler married an Elisabeth Berger. - At some point in the next few years he also worked as an engraver on the Swiss atlas , which was created according to plans by the Franco-German cartographer Johann Heinrich Weiss (1759–1826) and on the initiative of the Swiss entrepreneur Johann Rudolf Meyer (1739–1813) was created from 1786 to 1802; Other engravers besides him on this project were the French Christophe Guérin (1758–1831) from Strasbourg and the Swiss Samuel Johann Jakob Scheurmann (1771–1844) from Aarburg .

Bernese Senator in his official costume: Colored engraving by Eichler after a picture by Freudenberger around 1800

Around 1797 Eichler was in Herisau and worked there for the merchant and art dealer Johann (Jean) Walser together with other engravers and etchers on the so-called Russian prospectuses , the main part of which were 12 views of Moscow . Pictures by the French painter Gérard de la Barthe (1730–1810), who from 1787 to the end of his life only worked in Russia, served as a template for this work . - Then Eichler was back in Bern and there, among other things, created a series of colored engravings with Bernese official costumes after pictures by the painter Sigmund Freudenberger (1745–1801).

In 1805 Matthias Gottfried Eichler left Switzerland and settled in Augsburg. Among other things, he worked there as a teacher at the Imperial City Art Academy and became one of its directors in 1812. Some well-known works in the last years of his life were so-called re-engravings of famous pictures of the French Revolution as they were created by French draftsmen and engravers (some immediately after the immediate event).

literature

  • Robert Stalla: It doesn't always have to be Rembrandt: The print collection of the Art History Institute of the University of Munich , Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin and Munich 1999
  • Eugen Nerdinger , Lisa Beck: Three Hundred Years of the School of Design in Augsburg: From the Imperial City Art Academy to the Department of Design at the Augsburg University of Applied Sciences , Hieronymus Mühlberger Verlag, Augsburg 1987
  • Johann Georg Meusel : Teutsches Künstlerlexikon or directory of now living German artists: In addition to a directory of libraries worth seeing, art, coin and natural history cabinets in Germany and Switzerland (first volume) , in the Meyerschen Buchhandlung, Lemgo 1808
  • Johann Heinrich Füssli : Artist Lexicon, or: Brief message about the life and works of painters, sculptors, builders, copper engravers, art founders, steel cutters ... , at Orell, Füssli and Compagnie, Zurich 1806

Web links

Commons : Matthias Gottfried Eichler  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ The grandfather came from Liebstadt in Saxony and came to Augsburg in 1696, where he was a student of Johann Heiss (1640–1704) until 1703 . After that he worked in Italy and Austria and finally settled in Augsburg in 1711. The father was born in this city and has always lived in it, except for the years from 1743 to 1748, when he was a drawing teacher at the University of Erlangen, which is why Matthias Gottfried Eichler was born there.
  2. ↑ The pictures that Eichler have reproduced are probably all in the Tableaux historiques de la Révolution française (Historical Tables of the French Revolution), which appeared for the first time in France around 1816. These re-engravings were provided with their own German explanations. Other engravers besides Eichler included Johann Carl Bock , August Dalbon, Samuel Gysin, Joseph Hutter, Anton Krüger, Paul Jacob Laminit and Johann Karl Schleich .
personal data
SURNAME Eichler, Matthias Gottfried
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Eichler, Matthias G .; Eichler, MG; Eichler, Mathieu-G.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German draftsman and engraver
DATE OF BIRTH February 4, 1748
PLACE OF BIRTH gain
DATE OF DEATH June 19, 1821
Place of death augsburg