Sophus Claudius

Sophus Claudius (born June 15, 1815 in Schirnau in the parish of Bünsdorf , † February 13, 1883 in Kiel ) was a German decorative and landscape painter.

Live and act

Sophus Claudius was a son of the Dutch Matthias Friedrich Claudius, who worked in Hartenholm as the royal Danish chief forester. His mother Sophie Johanna Dorothea, née Jansen, came from Steinrade . He was one of Matthias Claudius' great nephews and was married to Meta Zester.

Claudius completed an apprenticeship as a painter in Schleswig and then worked as a painter's assistant in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main . In 1838/39 he attended the Munich Polytechnic and received orders for decorative paintings in the loggias and colonnades of the Alte Pinakothek under King Ludwig I. In 1840/42 he worked in Greece with decorative paintings for Friedrich von Gärtner's new palace in Athens , today's parliament building. In 1842 he traveled with the Bavarian history painter Claudius Schraupolph the Elder. Ä. via Smyrna to Naples. In Pompeii he studied the Roman wall paintings and dealt intensively with the encaustic painting technique. He processed his findings into his own designs, which he presented at the World Exhibition in Vienna in 1873 and at the Art and Industrial Exhibition in Munich in 1876.

After returning to Schleswig-Holstein, Claudius worked on the decorative design of Plön Castle, the Blomenburg and the mansions of Heiligenstedten and Bothkamp from 1845, and in 1857 on the "Pompeian" design of the first Kiel art gallery .

Black and white reproduction of his painting in the Kiel Kunsthalle

It was primarily his landscapes that made him known. This includes the “Way to Delphi”, in which he recorded the impressions of his trip to Greece and shows the region around Boeotia in bright colors. It was shown in the 1906 exhibition of the century of German art .

Encouraged by the Kiel painters Ernst Wolperding and Joachim Bunsow, Claudius turned to landscape painting; he received the strongest influences from Theodor Martens, a brother of the Kiel city architect Ludolf Martens, who had come into contact with the painters of the Barbizon artists' colony in Paris. Since these influences also radiated on Claudius, he was the most progressive painter in Kiel at the time. His house was a meeting point for future artists such as Hans Olde, Adolf Brütt and Hans Ritter von Petersen.

Works

• On the way to Delphi, oil on panel, 77.5 × 114 cm, Kunsthalle zu Kiel
• Landscape, around 187, oil on cardboard, 49 × 67.5 cm, Kiel City and Maritime Museum.

literature

• Claudius, Sophus . In: Ulrich Thieme (Hrsg.): General Lexicon of Fine Artists from Antiquity to the Present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 7 : Cioffi – Cousyns . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1912, p. 60 ( Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
• Marga Privat: Claudius, Sophus. in: Schleswig-Holstein Biographical Lexicon. Volume 3. Karl Wachholtz Verlag, Neumünster 1974, p. 75.
• Ulrich Schulte-Wülwer, Sophus Claudius, in: Ders. Kiel artists - art life and artist trips 1770–1870, Heide 2014, pp. 272–277. ISBN 978-3-8042-1406-4

Web links

Commons : Sophus Claudius  - collection of images, videos and audio files