Mother tower

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Mother tower
Mother Tower at night

The mother tower is located in Landsberg am Lech in Bavaria (Germany) in a small park on the west bank of the Lech river .

It was built by the painter, sculptor, musician, writer and pioneer of automobile racing in Germany, Sir Hubert von Herkomer (1849–1914) in honor of his mother, after the parents moved from England to Landsberg in 1877 at the request of his mother Hometown Waal and Denklingen ) were withdrawn, but the mother died at Christmas 1879.

On his next visit in 1880, Herkomer bought the property next to his parents' house and began to build a 30-meter-high tower based on his own design, which lasted until around 1887 for cost reasons. In addition to a room of honor for the mother and later also the father, there was also space for a studio in the tower.

The tower is an asymmetrical tuff block structure divided into five floors . It is assumed that the architect Henry Hobson Richardson , who was then very famous in the USA, had a stylistic influence , but Herkomer could not have met him personally until the end of 1885.

On September 2, 1888, Herkomer married his third wife, his sister-in-law Margaret Griffiths, in the Mutterturm , for which he had to take German citizenship and was naturalized in Landsberg.

However, the design (based on Herkomer's floor plan) for Villa Lululaund , which was built in Herkomer's English hometown of Bushey from around 1886, was clearly designed by HH Richardson . Hubert von Herkomer, who had emigrated with his parents from Germany in 1851, had lived there since 1873 and founded a school for painting in 1883 .

In 1939, at the time of fierce anti-German resentment at the beginning of the Second World War , this villa, often called "Bavarian castle" by the locals , was largely demolished - officially because of the exorbitant maintenance costs. Only the portal and part of the entrance area remained, now part of the British Legion Hall.

Since 1990, the original residential building, which is connected to the mother tower via a closed and covered wooden bridge, has housed the Herkomer Museum with around 100 exhibits, including paintings , sculptures and graphics from the holdings of the municipal Herkomer Foundation, as well as a registry office .

literature

  • Karl Gattinger, Grietje Suhr: Landsberg am Lech, city and district (= Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation [Hrsg.]: Monuments in Bavaria . Volume I.14 ). Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 2014, ISBN 978-3-7917-2449-2 , p. 559-563 .
  • The Herkomers. Vol. 1. Macmillan, London 1910. (Facsimile, PDF, 58 MB)
  • The Herkomers. Vol. 2. Macmillan, London 1911. (Facsimile, PDF, 59 MB)
  • The Herkomers, Neues Stadtmuseum, Landsberg 1999 192 pp.

Web links

Commons : Mother Tower  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ That same year [1880] the foundations were put in, and the structure rose to some six feet above the ground. Lit. The Herkomers, Vol 1, 123f
  2. ↑ Herkomer writes of six storeys.
  3. ↑ An English law at that time forbade widowers from marrying their sisters-in-law. From this time until his death, Herkomer had both citizenships. Lit. The Herkomers, Vol 2, 22ff
  4. ↑ Lit. The Herkomers, Vol 1, 104

Coordinates: 48 ° 3 ′ 0.4 ″  N , 10 ° 52 ′ 16 ″  E