Philipp Petri

Philipp Petri (born December 29, 1800 in Heiligenstadt , † April 25, 1868 in Göttingen ) was a German miniature and porcelain painter and a photography pioneer for the city of Göttingen.

Life

The pipe bowl from 1846 shows the coat of arms of the Corps Hannovera Göttingen with the original colors (red-blue-red) and still without the Hanseatic elements. The knight holding a shield stands in front of a romantic landscape

Nothing more is known about Petri's training, except that he must have been in Paris for studies in 1827 before coming to Göttingen at the end of the year. In Göttingen he was able to work for his future father-in-law, the clothing dealer and porcelain painter Heinrich Friedrich Wedemeyer . In 1829 he married into the Wedemeyer family. With the expansion of the workshop, the autodidact Wedemeyer and the house painter Petri found great recognition in the Kingdom of Hanover . Wedemeyer was able to withdraw from porcelain painting in favor of a new branch of the company, glass painting . Petri expanded the porcelain painting into a successful workshop, which was already established as such by his father-in-law, and, thanks to his training, ensured a considerable increase in the quality of the products. Since no porcelain was produced in the Kingdom of Hanover, the white porcelain had to be imported. It came as inexpensive mass-produced goods from various porcelain manufacturers in Central Germany, and in special cases white porcelain from the Fürstenberg porcelain manufactory and the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur Berlin were also painted.

Painted pipe bowls and cups were in particular demand from the students . While Wedemeyer initially applied mainly the coats of arms of corps , painting under Petri became more pleasing, varied and of higher quality. He was particularly known for his landscapes and hunting scenes. In the field of Studentica , he introduced a new motif in porcelain painting for Göttingen in the 1840s, a knight in armor as a shield holder for the respective student coat of arms in front of romantic landscape scenes that matched the origin of the members of the corps concerned. Work in this way is one of the most outstanding works in this area for the Studentica for the period up to the mid-1860s.

Later Petri turned to the new technique of the daguerreotype and thus became one of the photography pioneers in Göttingen. His son Bernhard Petri (1837–1887) took over the management of the porcelain painting, but gave it up after his father's death in order to continue his photo studio. The background to this was not least the ruinous competition in porcelain painting as a result of the introduction of freedom of trade . The daguerreotype and, following it, the portrait photo , however, soon replaced the silhouette among the Göttingen students , so that the portrait lithography developed at the beginning of the 19th century in Göttingen, in contrast to other university locations, gained no significance as a Kneip picture . In the 1850s, lithography only prevailed in Göttingen for the large-format semester pictures, by Daniel Cornelius Gesell and other wandering providers, and were printed in lithographic institutions such as Franz Hanfstaengl in Munich, because the photography initially did not technically cope with the desired formats could.

The history painter Heinrich Petri (1834–1872), a student of Ernst Deger and a friend of Friedrich Overbeck , is another son of Philipp Petri.

Honors

• Bronze medal at the trade exhibition of the trade association of the Kingdom of Hanover in 1837
• Bronze medal at the trade exhibition of the trade association of the Kingdom of Hanover in Hildesheim in 1839
• Bronze medal at the trade exhibition of the trade association of the Kingdom of Hanover in Hanover in 1840
• Silver medal at the trade exhibition of the trade association of the Kingdom of Hanover in Lüneburg in 1841
• Bronze medal at the trade exhibition of the trade association of the Kingdom of Hanover in 1844

Works

Works and workshop work by Philipp Petri and his son Bernhard Petri can be found in the Göttingen Municipal Museum . The Bismarck Museum in Friedrichsruh has a miniature portrait created by Philipp Petri of Otto von Bismarck as a student in Göttingen in 1833 on a porcelain medallion.

literature

• Thieme-Becker : Petri Philipp. In: General Lexicon of Fine Arts. Volume 26, Leipzig 1932, p. 497.
• Jens-Uwe Brinkmann: ... in every respect completely as beautiful as such work is done anywhere ... - Porcelain painting in Göttingen. Göttingen Municipal Museum, Göttingen 2000
• Anne-Katrin Sors: The provenances of the Göttingen paintings of the 19th century in: Academic rigor and artistic freedom: the paintings of the 19th century in the art collection of the University of Göttingen: inventory catalog , Universitätsverlag Göttingen, 2013, p. 38 ff. (P. 47/48 to the Petri family)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thieme-Becker, Volume 26, Leipzig 1932, p. 496.