Sophie von Scheve

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Sophie Theodora Philippine Friederike Emilie von Scheve (born April 25, 1855 in Schwerin , † January 22, 1925 in Dobbertin ) was a German painter from the Düsseldorf School .

Life

Von Scheve was the eldest of four children of the Mecklenburg-Schwerin Justice and Ministerial Councilor Hermann von Scheve and his wife Agnes, born von Stralendorff (1824–1901). She received artistic training as a private student of the Baltic German history painter Eduard von Gebhardt , one of the most important protagonists of Protestant church painting in Germany, who had been teaching at the Düsseldorf Art Academy since 1873 .

Tenement building Adalbertstrasse 76, Munich

From 1891/1892, von Scheve was recorded at the address Adalbertstrasse 76/0 in Munich's Maxvorstadt . Apparently, the then 36-year-old referred to herself as a “baroness” or “baroness”, although she was not a baron , but merely a correspondence officer . She also made herself look younger by making 1869 the year she was born. She became a member of the Munich Artists' Association , where she was involved as a committee member, juror and substitute auditor. In 1897 she exhibited a Circe and a Saint Cecilia in the Munich Glass Palace . In 1899, several of her pictures were shown in an exhibition in Wiesbaden , in 1906 she was represented in the Leipzig art salon Del Vecchio with a landscape of Lake Ammer .

Residential building Rottmanstrasse 17, Munich

In 1900 von Scheve moved to Rottmannstrasse 17, a historicist residential and studio house of the painter Hugo Kauffmann , where she still lived in 1907. Her close friend, the writer Ricarda Huch , described her dwelling there as "a pretty apartment of the older kind in Rottmannstrasse, with surprising corridors and corners, furnished with furniture that was old and precious, but partly worn out." on her "a most comfortable and elegant impression, even if it was very messy."

The portrait of Ricarda Huch was created there in 1903 , an oil painting on canvas (90 × 112 cm) that came from the Huch family property to the collection of the German Literature Archive in Marbach in 1968 . The portrait , in warm tones, is considered to be “perhaps the most youthful and vivid portrait” of the 39-year-old poet and shows her in a mustard-yellow velvet blouse, looking at the viewer intensely and suggestively with half-closed eyes, holding a white tuft of flowers in front of her nose. The intimate-looking portrait from the bohemian atmosphere of Scheves' artist's apartment in Munich, which suggests a close friendship between poet and painter, is more a "milieu sketch" than a true portrait of Huch. In the immediate personal environment Huch the picture came quite on displeasure, so held Marienbaum , another friend Huch, the portrait of a "portrait, which, as the artist Ricarda had interpreted only on the erotic side, me and other friends grieved".

After the Munich Artists' Association split in 1905, von Scheve belonged to the Association of Munich Women Artists , led by the landscape painter Bertha "Betty" Nägeli (* 1853) . His work was judged unfavorably by the art historian Hans Rosenhagen in a review of an exhibition that took place in Fritz Gurlitt's salon in 1906 : “These ladies don't seem to suspect how deeply they humiliate themselves and how little they become acquainted with art has to do". He certified von Scheve with a "fantastic sense" and a "peculiar color feeling".

In addition to painting, von Scheve also practiced photography .

Socially, she moved in the affluent and art-loving circles of the upper class. In Munich she met Hedwig Pringsheim , "the grande dame of the Munich intellectual scene", whose salons in the Stadtpalais Arcisstrasse 12 she frequented as a frequent guest from February 1893 to 1925. Over tea in the Pringsheim house, she made friends with Ricarda Huch, then wife of the dentist Ermanno Ceconi (1871-1927). In 1904, von Scheve made Pringsheim acquainted with the poet Stefan George , a contact that Pringsheim had because of George's “bohemian attitudes, in which the bourgeoisie everywhere a. Ends spurting out ”, felt as“ embarrassing company ”and therefore ended.

She also belonged to the women's movement , for which Huch lectured. From 1899 to 1904 she was a member of the "Society for the Advancement of Intellectual Interests of Women", soon renamed the Association for Women's Interests . In addition, she frequented the circle of " cosmists ", to which the writer Karl Wolfskehl , who was a friend of her, belonged.

Von Scheve made trips to Paris , where the Munich publisher Albert Langen lived with his Swedish wife Dagny, a daughter of the writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson . From 1905 to 1907 she lived in Italy (Venice, Florence, Sicily). In January 1906 von Scheve stayed in Taormina . At that time she was accompanied by a “friend and count” who appears in her letters with the family name “Waletsky”. In Thomas Mann's story, Beim Propheten , he is mentioned as a “Polish painter”, while von Scheve himself figures there as “the slim girl who lived with him”. Pringsheim, Mann's mother-in-law, perceived the landscapes that he painted and exhibited by Franz Josef Brakl as “strange pictures”. The open relationship that von Scheve had with “Waletsky” was difficult. In 1905, she described him to her friend Ricarda Huch in a letter as “a completely insane person” who clung to her. When her apartment on Rottmannstrasse was canceled in 1907, she contemplated moving to a house in Grünwald with “Waletsky” . Eventually they both moved to Taormina. In 1911 von Scheve returned to Munich without “Waletsky”. There she found accommodation in the home of the Wolfskehl couple. From 1912 she lived in the British crown colony of Malta , which she left immediately when the First World War broke out in 1914 so as not to be interned as an enemy foreigner.

Dobertin Monastery, aerial photo 1930

Concerned about her material livelihood, von Scheve remembered her entitlement to a place of residence in the Dobbertin monastery , a women's foundation for nobles of the Lutheran denomination. Following family tradition, her father enrolled her there a few days after she was born. In the fall of 1914 she registered, on November 23, 1915 she officially moved into the apartment of Prioress Melanie von Hobe zu Merseburg (1839-1914), who had recently died . When, after the First World War and the Revolution, the new state government of Mecklenburg-Schwerin dissolved the monasteries and monasteries in November 1918 and moved into the assets of the Free State, and in 1920 a law reduced the claims of the canonesses, von Scheves' material situation deteriorated again. She traveled to Munich one last time in the winter of 1924/1925. On January 15th, she met Pringsheim there. Back in Dobbertin, she died at the age of 69 on January 22, 1925. A grave in the monastery cemetery in Dobbertin, where she was buried on January 26, has not survived.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Museum Kunstpalast : Artists of the Düsseldorf School of Painting (selection, as of November 2016, PDF ; 2.5 MB)
  2. ^ Gothaisches Genealogisches Taschenbuch der Nobeligen houses . Justus Perthes, Volume 16 (1922), p. 768
  3. ↑ Michael Stolleis , p. 148, footnote 11
  4. ^ Ricarda Huch : Memories of your own life . Frankfurt 1982, p. 311
  5. ↑ Katrin Lemke: The Ricarda Huch portrait of the Jena doctor Rudolf Lemke. A picture and its background . In: Weimar - Jena. The big city . 7/2 (2014) pp. 113–125
  6. ↑ Marie Baum : Shining trace. The life of Ricarda Huch . Tübingen 1950, p. 180
  7. ^ Hans Rosenhagen : From exhibitions and collections . In: Die Kunst für Alle , No. 12, March 15, 1906, pp. 281–286, here p. 284 ( digitized version )
  8. ↑ Michael Stolleis, p. 150
  9. ↑ Michael Stolleis, p. 151, footnote 23
  10. ↑ Cristina Herbst (Ed.): Hedwig Pringsheim. Diaries 1911–1916 . Volume 5, Göttingen 2016, p. 238
personal data
SURNAME Scheve, Sophie von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Scheve, Sophie Theodora Philippine Friederike Emilie von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter from the Düsseldorf School
DATE OF BIRTH April 25, 1855
PLACE OF BIRTH Schwerin
DATE OF DEATH January 22, 1925
Place of death Dobbertin