Ornamental Hermit

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The nerd as an attraction. Diogenes by John William Waterhouse , 1882.

Jewelry hermits or ornamental hermits ( Engl. Ornamental hermits , also garden hermits , ie garden hermits ) were hermits who during the 18th and 19th century English landscape park inhabited and it came in an employment relationship. Ornamental hermits lived for a contractually agreed period in specially established hermitages and had to show themselves at certain times of the day in order to entertain the owners of the parks and their guests with their sight.

Life as a jewelry hermit

The demands on life as a jewelry hermit are known from newspaper advertisements. The best-known example of the employment of a decorative hermit can be found in Painshill Park , a property of the landed nobleman Charles Hamilton (1704–1786), which was converted at great expense into a landscape garden with a typical grotto , neo-Gothic and Chinese architecture, serpentine paths and a tree house as a hermitage . Hamilton allegedly exposed an advertisement that would earn £ 700 who was willing to “stay seven years at the Hermitage, where he would be with a Bible, glasses, doormat, straw sack as a pillow, an hourglass as a timer, water as a Drink and food from the house should be provided. He had to wear a woolen robe and under no circumstances could he cut his hair, beard or nails, wander beyond the confines of Mr. Hamilton's property, or even have a word with the servant. "

The long contract period and the peculiar personal hygiene conditions were not an isolated case. The way a jewelry hermit lived was probably influenced by the earth houses . These were common in rural areas until the early 20th century and were only banned in Great Britain by a 1915 law. For example, a landowner near Preston advertised the position of a jewelry hermit for someone "who was willing to live underground for seven years without ever seeing a person and without cutting his hair, beard, fingernails or toenails" . In more recent studies, however, it has been shown that this advertisement with the alleged working conditions was a construction of the media without specific references, which spread as a sensationalist topos through the literature and over time, through continued quoting, congealed into a kind of alleged "truth".

Obviously, interested parties were not only looked for, but also offered themselves. In an advertisement from 1810, a young man (jewelry hermits were usually of an advanced age) announced that he “ wanted to withdraw from the world and live as a hermit somewhere in England” and was ready to “ to put in contact with a nobleman or gentleman who desires to have such a hermit ”. In Hawkstone Park , a landscaped garden visited by more than 10,000 visitors in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a mechanical doll took the place of the jewelry hermit. This was in a hermitage equipped with an hourglass, skull and glasses on a table and was served by a clerk who spoke to her mouth movements.

Ornamental ceremonies in Germany

In 1795 a decorative ceremony in the Flottbeck garden of the Hamburg citizen Caspar Voght (1752–1839) is known, as well as in the Hinüberschen garden in Hanover , which was created after 1766 .

Hermit in Flotbek . Sepia drawing by Johann B. Th. Schmitt, 1795. Hamburger Kunsthalle

Cultural-historical aspects

Hermitage with memento mori above the door, Universal Architecture, 1755.

The English landscape garden as a walk-in landscape painting replaced the geometrically ordered baroque garden in the course of the 18th century . This development was related to the discussion that has been going on in Europe since the 17th century about the natural state of man as a counter-position to civilization and communal life. In this constellation, the interest in jewelry hermit corresponded to that in the “ noble savage ”, who embodied the unspoiled nature that was not destroyed by the constraints of communal life. In general, elements of various traditions of turning away from civilization and their fascination for society were combined in the decorative hermit. The furnishing of the Hermitage with a Bible referred to the Christian hermit, the glasses to the scholar. Behind this was a long tradition that began with the traditions of the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (who is said to have lived in a barrel as a despiser of civilization) and extended to Jonathan Swift's Gulliver (in the third trip to Laputa , where completely forgotten and filthy scientists appear).

The phenomenon of jewelry hermits accompanied an increased interest in English literature in hermits in the 18th century. The main source of inspiration for this is the work of John Milton , especially his highly influential poem Il Penseroso (The Pensive One), in which a forest walker spends his days solitary studies and speaks the final words:

“And may at last my weary age
Find out the peaceful hermitage,
The hairy gown and mossy cell
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every star that heav'n doth show,
And every herb that sips the dew;
Till old experience do attain
To something like prophetic strain.
These pleasures, Melancholy, give,
And I with thee will choose to live. "

“And may my tired old age
find the peaceful hermitage at last ,
The hairy robe and the cell overgrown with moss,
Where I can sit and correctly interpret
every star that the sky shows,
and every herb that soaks up the dew;
Until many years of experience come close
to something like prophecy. Give
these joys, melancholy,
And with you I will choose to live. "

The final lines of Milton's poem appeared in numerous hermitages, which had already been designed as places of secular reflection for baroque gardens, and the Arcadian motif of transience through the use of bones and skulls appeared just as often as memento mori . The furnishing of the ornate hermit with an hourglass (apart from the usefulness in keeping to the schedule for the regular appearances in the area) also referred to this aspect of his portrayal task. The image of the jewelry hermit, which not only raised fundamental questions about the attitude of the individual towards society and life by discarding typical civilizational features such as refined clothing and body care, fluctuated between seriousness and wit. This ambivalence was also often expressed in the follies (i.e. "architectural follies ") of landscaped gardens, which were common in 18th-century England, like ornamental hermits.

The employment of jewelry hermits ceased in the first half of the 19th century, and the colonial expansion of the European nation-states subsequently shifted interests. Völkerschauen took on the task of drawing pictures of people far from their own civilization. As a term, Ornamental Hermit has remained present in the English-speaking world to this day and no longer needs to be understood in the actual sense, but can generally stand for an eccentric lifestyle. Recently, there has also been an increased artistic treatment of the topic in various media (literature, film and photo, performance).

literature

Non-fiction
  • Gordon Campbell: The Hermit in the Garden. From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013, ISBN 978-0-19-969699-4
  • Isabel Colegate: A Pelican in the Wilderness. Hermits, Solitaries, and Recluses. Harper-Collins, London 2002, ISBN 0-00-257142-0 .
  • Charlotte Schoell-Glass: Staged Solitude. A ceremony in Flottbek near Hamburg. On a sheet by Johann Baptist Theobald Schmitt in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. In: Idea. Yearbook of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Vol. 10, 1991, ISSN  0724-133X , pp. 197-206.
  • Edith Sitwell : English eccentric. A gallery of the most remarkable and remarkable ladies and gentlemen. ("English eccentrics"). New edition. Wagenbach, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-8031-1192-7 , pp. 38-43.
  • Hans Ost: Hermits and Monks in German Painting of the 19th Century. Düsseldorf 1971.
Fiction

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ The best-known description of the phenomenon can be found in the book English Eccentrics by Edith Sitwell from 1933, which uses the self-published English Eccentrics and Eccentricities by John Timbs and its evaluations of old newspapers and magazines. Isabel Colegate's research in 2002 is based on other secondary sources and comes to comparable results.
  2. ↑ Horace Walpole , who significantly influenced the development of the English landscape park, praised the facility. It is noteworthy that Daniel Defoe , who later invented an involuntary hermit in Robinson Crusoe , also mentioned Painshill Park in his writings.
  3. ↑ a b c Sitwell, p. 40.
  4. ^ Claus Heinrich Bill: O beata solitudo o sola beatitudo? Ceremonies as a cultural phenotype in the XVIII. Säkulum (Part 2/3) , in: Journal for German Aristocracy Research, Volume No. 80, Volume XVII., Sønderborg på øen Als 2014, page 42
  5. ↑ Charlotte Schoell-Glass: Staged Solitude. A ceremony in Flottbek near Hamburg. On a sheet by Johann Baptist Theobald Schmitt in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Hamburger Kunsthalle . In: Idea (=  yearbook of the Hamburger Kunsthalle ). No. 10 , 1991, ISSN  0724-133X , pp. 197 .
  6. ^ For example, in Robert Murray Davis : The Ornamental Hermit: People and Places of the New West , 2004.
  7. ↑ Artistic reenactment of an Ornamental Hermit in Shugborough Hall in 2002, web link  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Artistic reenactment of an Ornamental Hermit in Painshill Park in 2004, weblink .@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.staffordshire.gov.uk