Meinrad Iten

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Meinrad Iten (born June 30, 1867 in Unterägeri ; † June 28, 1932 there ) was a Swiss painter from the Düsseldorf School .

life and work

Meinrad Iten was born in “Haus Eimerloch” near Buechli in Unterägeri. When he was two years old, he lost his father Jakob Josef Iten, a cooper by trade. He grew up in modest circumstances with his mother Barbara Iten, daughter of a potter , in the household of his uncle Johann Josef Iten (1822–1907) in Unterägeri. From 1881 to 1883 he attended the Catholic collegiate school in Einsiedeln , where he received his first drawing lessons, and decided to become a church painter. After attending the grammar school in Stans in 1883 and the college in Sarnen , he took art lessons from Melchior Paul von Deschwanden in Stans and at the Beuron art school . In 1885 Iten went to Munich to the studio of the Zug painter Joseph Brandenberg (1858–1906), where he took preparatory lessons for the desired course at the Düsseldorf Art Academy .

In the autumn of 1885 Iten was admitted to the Academy in Düsseldorf , first attending Heinrich Lauenstein's elementary class , followed by Adolf Schill's ornamentation class and Hugo Crola's preparatory class . On the advice of Crola, he gave up the religious genre in favor of portraiture . In the antique and natural class of Johann Peter Theodor Janssen in 1887/1888 he was assessed as "very talented", but was often absent due to lack of resources. Peter Janssen supported his pupil and was the first foreigner to enable him to receive scholarships from the Prussian state in 1891 and 1892. In 1893 he completed his art studies with Janssen.

Iten had a personal relationship with Eduard von Gebhardt , whom he admired and whom he had come closer to in the artists' association “ Malkasten ”, where the combative professor was often a guest. He was friends with Arthur Kampf , three years older than him, as well as with the Swiss painter Aloys Fellmann . From 1888 to 1902 he was a member of the Malkasten artists' association . In 1892 he joined the Laetitia Academic Artists' Association . There he was given the joking alias “Uli”, just as his friend and fellow student at the Academy of Landscape Painters Carl Dahl (1867–1937) received the alias “Chick”, although it was very tall.

The first successes as a portrait painter were achieved. He received orders from well-known personalities in the city and from northern Germany. Iten remained in Düsseldorf as a freelance artist until 1899 and had a studio in the so-called Wunderbau on Pempelforter Strasse. In 1896 he exhibited together with Crola in the Eduard Schulte Gallery and received excellent reviews. In the same year he also exhibited at the International Art Exhibition in Berlin . In 1899, Iten turned down a position offered by the Düsseldorf Academy Director Peter Janssen with career prospects at the Academy and returned to Switzerland. During his home stays, he had met Wilhelmine Hess, daughter of a wealthy Hamburg butcher shop owner, whom he married in 1901 against her father's will. In 1902 his wife gave birth to daughter Anna, in 1905 to daughter Elisabeth († 1961) and in 1906 to son Franz.

Iten worked as a successful portraitist of upper-class families in Zurich and Solothurn and produced portraits of church dignitaries. After the First World War , because of his conservative, naturalistic view, he received increasingly less representative commissions and concentrated on drawings , many of them in red chalk . He drew more than a thousand portraits of people from the Aegeri valley and the Zug region as well as landscapes in the immediate vicinity. In the 1920s, Iten portrayed Zug district officers . His most important sponsor was Philipp Etter , Cantonal Councilor of Zug and later Vice President of the Federal Council . From 1907 until his death in June 1932 Meinrad Iten lived in the Buechli in Unterägeri, at Alte Landstrasse 33. His wife Wilhelmine Iten-Hess outlived him by thirty years.

Meinrad Iten was one of the most important Swiss portrait draftsmen of his time. In 1987 the Unterägeri Citizens' Council and the «Meinrad Iten Working Group» made the preservation and promotion of the memory of the painter Iten, with a catalog raisonné (see below) and the establishment of a representative collection of pictures, their main task. With “Meinard Iten Fonds”, she is increasingly devoting herself to promoting art.

Meinrad Iten is on his mother's side the great-grandfather of British Issie Barratt , who composed Issie Barratt's Meinrad Iten Suite for a selection of eleven of his paintings and recorded it in September 2010 at Trinity College of Music in London.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Collection signature of the art academy: in 1887 - No. BR 0004 No. 1562, sheet 608V; in 1888 - BR 0004 No. 1562, sheet 18V
  2. ↑ Bettina Baumgärtel , Sabine Schroyen, Lydia Immerheiser, Sabine Teichgröb: Directory of foreign artists. Nationality, residence and studies in Düsseldorf. In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918. Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, p. 433.
  3. ↑ possibly it is about Karl Wilhelm Dahl (1869–1942) , on antik-hense.de, accessed on July 29, 2016
  4. ^ Portrait of a woman, Meinrad Iten, red chalk drawing February 21, 1908
  5. ↑ Landscape, Meinrad Iten, October 11, 1923
  6. ↑ Meinrad Iten: Portraitist and Landscapes ( Memento of the original from July 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in Aegeritaler of February 1, 2013, p. 16 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.fromyprint.ch
  7. ^ Meinrad-Iten-Fonds, Bürgergemeinde Unterägeri
  8. Jump up ↑ Issie Barratt's Meinrad Iten Suite: 11 musical settings of paintings by Meinrad Iten (Fuzzy Moon Records, 2011; with Rowland Sutherland, Mick Foster, Mark Donlon); Meinrad Iten is Issie's maternal great-grandfather , on fuzzymoonrecords.co, accessed on July 29, 2016
personal data
SURNAME Iten, Meinrad
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss portrait and landscape painter
DATE OF BIRTH June 30, 1867
PLACE OF BIRTH Unterägeri
DATE OF DEATH June 28, 1932
Place of death Unterägeri