Morgenstern's miniature cabinet
The Morgenstern miniature cabinet consists of three cabinets that belong to the Morgenstern family of Frankfurt artists. They are the painters and restorers Johann Ludwig Ernst Morgenstern (1738–1819), his son Johann Friedrich Morgenstern (1777–1844) and his grandson Carl Morgenstern (1811–1893).
The three morning stars
The three Morgensterns filled the cupboards between 1798 and 1843 with small copies of paintings they had restored. This miniature picture gallery is an extraordinary testimony to the history of painting and restoration. Johann Ludwig Ernst Morgenstern worked in Frankfurt am Main in a variety of ways as a painter, copyist and restorer , as an art agent and dealer. After his apprenticeship with his father and the years of wandering that took him to Salzdahlum, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Darmstadt, he finally settled in Frankfurt in 1772. He acquired Frankfurt citizenship in 1776. As early as 1780 he was head of the Frankfurt “Mahler Society”. In 1785 Johann Ludwig Ernst Morgenstern was able to purchase a house on the south side of the noble Zeil near the Katharinenkirche for 6000 guilders (Lit. D. No. 203). Johann Friedrich Morgenstern was to follow in his father's footsteps both as an artist and as a restorer and also to work as an expert and author of auction catalogs. Johann Friedrich left his hometown only 1797–1798 for his training with Klengel at the Dresden Academy . The grandson Carl Morgenstern , born in Frankfurt in 1811, realized the dream of many German painters and visited Italy from 1834 to 1837 to study the art of the elderly and to fill his sketchbooks with motifs. He established himself as a landscape painter in Frankfurt and was hardly active as a restorer anymore; he had achieved the emancipation as a free artist that his grandfather had not been able to do. Carl Morgenstern died in his hometown in 1893.
Collection creation and history
In 1798, Johann Ludwig Ernst Morgenstern made the momentous decision to collect, for his pleasure, a collection of small copies made by him on a rejuvenated scale based on the best originals by famous masters of the old, middle and recent times and to arrange them in three portable cupboards. He had made these wing cabinets or triptychs in advance and fitted them with 205 framed wooden tablets. By his death in 1821 he made over 150 miniature copies for the cupboards; then Johann Friedrich Morgenstern took over the direction and made a good 50 copies for his part; only one picture was taken by grandson Carl. How should one now imagine the approach of the Morgenstern? If a painting that appealed to you artistically and in terms of content came to the workshop for restoration, you first had to decide on a wooden panel that was almost true to scale and second - if there were several options - think about the placement of the copy: a very complex decision-making process, which always again subject to revisions. The small picture gallery should, of course, have a harmonious hanging arrangement that is balanced in terms of both content and form, with diverse references and references, in which the subjects, artists and schools entered into a meaningful dialogue. The result is a "baroque" hanging not according to schools, but according to pictorial themes symmetrically arranged in counterparts.
Structure of the collection
The focus of the Morgenstern Miniature Cabinet is - typical for Frankfurt - on the Dutch painters of the Golden Age - the great role models of the Morgenstern - and their German successors of the 17th and 18th centuries. The Morgensterns had a particular fondness for landscape and genre painting , two genres that had gained in importance in Dutch art. A third extensive group consists of profane and sacred history paintings .
After the death of his father, Johann Friedrich Morgenstern gave the cabinet a new programmatic orientation by exchanging the paintings hanging in the center of the two cabinets on the side. He replaced them with copies based on Dürer and Raffael , two models of the Nazarenes who were influential in Frankfurt . They flank Johann Ludwig Ernst's copy of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta's Assumption of Mary from the Frankfurt Teutonic Order Church; the altarpiece was stolen during the occupation of Frankfurt by French revolutionary troops in 1796 and is now in the Louvre . This triptych within a triptych gives the cabinet a national patriotic connotation, in which, in addition to the indictment of French art theft, backward-looking, Nazarene ideals also play a dominant role.
Fate of the collection
Carl Morgenstern sold the miniature cabinet in 1857 - probably due to financial difficulties - for 1,800 guilders to the Frankfurt art dealer Anton Baer, who published the first printed catalog of the collection. The attached plans show the arrangement of the copies at that time. Baer evidently quickly found an English buyer, perhaps a dealer or a traveler. It was not until 1979/80 that the three cabinets found in England were brought back to Frankfurt. The middle cabinet came into the possession of the banking house Gebrüder Bethmann , which made it available on permanent loan to the Frankfurt Goethe Museum , while the city of Frankfurt bought the two outer cabinets for the Historical Museum . There they are exhibited today in the Saalhof from the Hohenstaufen era as part of the permanent exhibition “Frankfurt Collectors and Donors”.
literature
- Petra Maisak , "Das Morgenstern'sche Miniaturcabinet" * in: Yearbook of the Free German Hochstift 1983, pp. 354–360
- Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff / Kurt Wettengl, Civil Collections in Frankfurt 1700-1830 , Frankfurt 1988.
- Wolfgang Cillessen, Small Copies. The Morgenstern Miniature Cabinet (1796-1843) . In: Frankfurt collectors and donors. Historisches Museum Frankfurt, Schriften Volume 32, Frankfurt 2012, pp. 99–118.