Guardian angel picture
The picture genre of the guardian angel pictures or representations was especially widespread in the oil printing industry since the 1880s. The sentimental depictions, in which a guardian angel forms the motif , were the epitome of the petty-bourgeois wall decoration of both denominations and a bestseller that hardly any art publisher did without.
Origin and motives
The guardian angel motif had its origin in the devotional image of the Nazarenes and was then adopted into religious salon painting before it was discovered by the picture factories. In contrast to the medieval image type of the soul guide, the religious character of the images increasingly faded into the background. The iconographic influences also include Wilhelm von Kaulbach's death picture with a motif of the type “Angel to God” and the dreamy pictures of the Scotsman John Burr .
A common form of guardian angel pictures shows a guardian angel next to little girls in nightgowns during morning and evening prayers in front of an iron or wooden cot. Such representations, which not infrequently contain erotic allusions, were mainly distributed in southern and central European countries. The prototype for this genre of “praying children” was the painting The Infant Samuel by Joshua Reynolds .
Another important form is the escort of angels in the open countryside. Here again the “abyssal images” play a major role. They mostly go back to Bernhard Plockhorst's Guardian Angel, which was exhibited in 1886 at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin . However, the motif itself is even older and can be found as early as the 1830s. Initially, almost exclusively depictions of boys and girls on the precipice or on a crumbling bridge were produced, together with a - contrary to all conventions of Christian iconography - a female angel who watches over the nicely dressed up children with his protective hands. The thin, light, light clothing of the children depicted had little in common with reality. Overall, only the background, the number of children (one or two) and the angel's clothing vary. Technical achievements such as railways and automobiles were only depicted late and only occasionally.
After the First World War there were also small-format depictions of a child's guardian angel as a playmate in the middle-class children's room.
Bedroom pictures and other forms
Guardian angel pictures were preferably hung over the cot, but were also sold as bedroom pictures from the 1920s . The old motifs, which had already served as postcard motifs before the First World War, were taken over and they were redrawn in the wide format usual for bedroom pictures by simply adding a little landscape to the left and right. One of the best-known examples of this type goes back to a formerly widespread picture by Zabateri (pseudonym of Hans Zatzka ), which was redrawn by Lindberg (pseudonym of the portrait painter Großmann) and published in 1928 in the magazine Der Kunsthandel as a new publication. Curiously, in this version the children seem to be walking across the bridge due to the way they are drawn. In the year it was published, Eugen Roth described the picture as follows: “Guardian angel, dearly meant, will unfortunately please many of our readers very much. (Not poisonous, but inedible) ”. The angel from this picture was later slightly changed by a Linz painter under the pseudonym "Marsani" and placed in an "abyss scene". As a search of today's online sellers of art prints shows, guardian angel pictures of this type are still primarily produced for the US market. Some of them are based directly on the Zatzka picture, with only the painting style or the skin color of the characters being changed.
A study carried out in 1970, which evaluated 622 student essays on domestic wall decorations, showed that guardian angel images were more widespread in Protestant than in Catholic houses; more than twice as much for the pictures in the bedroom.
The fashion of the porcelain nippes (mostly bisque porcelain ) and the children's grave monuments , on which a guardian angel is depicted, probably originated in France. Unapproved plastic imitations of guardian angel images were relentlessly prosecuted by the art publishers.
Guardian angel picture by Matthäus Kern , 1840
Guardian angel picture by Bernhard Plockhorst, 1886
Chromolithography, 1898
"Evening prayer", counterpart to the picture above
literature
- Wolfgang Brückner: Elfenreigen - wedding dream. The oil pressure production 1880–1940. Pp. 68-73. M. DuMont Schauberg, Cologne 1974, ISBN 3-7701-0762-4
- Wolfgang Brückner: Petty bourgeois and affluent bourgeois wall decorations in the 20th century. In art and consumption - mass image research (= folklore as historical cultural studies 6; publications on folklore and cultural history 82). Pp. 407-444, here p. 426. Würzburg 2000
- Bruno Langner: Evangelical world of images. Prints between 1850 and 1950 (= publications and catalogs of the Franconian Open Air Museum 16; catalogs of the Hohenloher Open Air Museum 9). Pp. 137-141. Verlag Fränkisches Freilandmuseum, Bad Windsheim 1992, ISBN 3-926834-22-6
Web links
- Description of a guardian angel picture by Fridolin Leiber (Massing open-air museum)
Individual evidence
- ^ Eugen Roth: Art, Kitsch and Trash. More beautiful home. Erbe und Gegenwart 33 (1938): 129–138, here p. 133. Quoted in Langner: Evangelische Bilderwelt , p. 141
- ↑ Leoni Nelken: Religious Wall Decoration - The Bedroom as a Reserve? Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 66 (1970): 163-166, ISSN 0044-3700 . Quoted in Langner: Evangelische Bilderwelt , p. 141
- ^ Museum of Applied Art Gera, Hans-Peter Jakobson (Ed.): Bad kitsch and nice knickknacks. 100 years of trivial culture. P. 70. MAK, Gera 1997