Themistocles by corner breaker

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Themistocles by corner breaker
Advertising page Norddeutscher Lloyd , painted by Themistocles von Eckenbrecher, 1903

Karl Paul Themistocles von Eckenbrecher (born November 17, 1842 in Athens , † December 4, 1921 in Goslar ) was a German landscape and marine painter of late Romanticism and historicism .

Life

Family and early years

His father came from a Prussian officer family, first studied philosophy, later medicine, and worked in the Orient for some time. His mother, an Italian, was the daughter of a respected Trieste merchant. Themistocles von Eckenbrecher was born on November 17, 1842 in Athens, where his parents stopped off. Even the father was a cosmopolitan, interested in many things, especially in oriental and ancient culture, in Greek history and art, and befriended Heinrich Schliemann , to whom he is said to have given decisive advice in the search for Troy . In 1843 the family temporarily returned to Berlin. There the young Themistocles attended the English-American school. When he accompanied his father on his travels, he was raised by private tutors. Since then he has been enthusiastic about sailing ships, which would later become a recurring motif in his work. The family lived in Constantinople from 1850 to 1857 . She then moved to Potsdam, where she lived until 1861. In 1875 he married the Mecklenburg landowner daughter Johanna Stever, called Jane.

Corner breaker as a painter

Postcard with the image of Tangas , 1914
Raftsund, Lofoten, seen from the Lauksund trading post, Trolltinden in the background and the steamship Deutschland III, 1906
Place at the Jeni Dschami mosque in Constantinople, signed and dated 'TvEckenbrecher / 1873' (bottom left), oil on canvas, 140 × 200 cm

When the son made his parents want to become a marine and landscape painter, they encouraged him. At that time the father was running a practice in Potsdam ; In 1859/60 he sent Themistocles as a pupil to the court painter Carl Gustav Wegener there . The family lived in Düsseldorf from 1861 to 1867 , where the son was a private student of Oswald Achenbach from 1861 to 1863 and soon became one of his favorite students. He follows his teacher in the brilliance of the color, in the light effects and the glamorous scenery of the composition of his paintings, but without achieving the charm of his accessories . In Düsseldorf, Eckenbrecher was a member of the Malkasten artists' association . The painter traveled all over Europe , especially Norway and the Middle East, and always brought new motifs home with him. After a trip to Egypt in the winter of 1881, von Eckenbrecher and his colleague Wilhelm Simmler produced the Orient panorama “Entry of the Mecca Caravan into Cairo” (118 × 15 meters) for the city of Hamburg. In 1892 he made a trip to the colonies and toured a. a. Africa and the Philippines . Corner breaker spoke eleven languages. In 1889, Eckenbrecher settled in Berlin. There he kept in close contact with Jane von Arnim (née von Walsleben). In 1919, two years before his death, he moved to Goslar , where he found his final resting place in the old cemetery.

He also made templates for postcards. a. were sold by shipping companies and the Verlag Deutsches Kolonialhaus.

Descendant

Von Eckenbrecher's son of the same name, Gustav Heinrich Themistokles von Eckenbrecher (1876–1935), spent a large part of his life as an officer and farmer in Okombahe in what was then German South West Africa , about which his wife Margarethe, née Hopfer (1875–1955), published a book.

to travel

Many of Eckenbrecher's pictures are dated. The dating of the pictures does not always allow conclusions to be drawn about the dating of the trips, as he did not paint or repeat many pictures in the studio until years later. The following attempts to list the verifiable trips chronologically:

  • 1862 Switzerland, Bernese Oberland
  • 1865 Switzerland, Bernese Oberland
  • 1871 Constantinople
  • 1872 England, Scotland, Iceland
  • 1873 Romania, Orient, Greece, Italy
  • 1874 Russian polar region
  • 1875 Turkey, Greece, Italy
  • 1876 ​​Switzerland
  • 1880 England, France, Denmark, Scotland, Switzerland, Norway
  • 1881 Egypt, Cairo (?)
  • 1882 Norway (often since then)
  • 1884 England
  • 1890 Podolia
  • 1892 Africa (including today's Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi)
  • 1898 (?) Tenerife
  • 1894 Lofoten
  • 1905 Sicily, Svalbard
  • 1907 Romania, Constantinople, Greece, Italy
  • 1910 Portugal, Tenerife
Grave site in Goslar

Exhibitions

Since 1870, Eckenbrecher exhibited in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Munich and numerous other cities. His work “Place near the mosque 'Jeni Dschami' in Constantinople” was exhibited at the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873 (No. 366). In 1879 he received a first prize at the World Exhibition in Sydney . To mark his 100th birthday, a commemorative exhibition with 135 works and an opportunity to buy from the estate took place in Goslar in 1942.

Nowadays, Eckenbrecher is rarely shown in public exhibitions, while it is quite popular on the art market, especially when it comes to oriental motifs . The German Maritime Museum in Bremerhaven owns a collection of smaller works .

Works (selection)

  • Illustrations for Behind the Coulisse. Comedy. Twenty-five year anniversary of the Artists Support Association in Düsseldorf. Düsseldorf 1869, urn : nbn: de: hbz: 061: 2-35040

literature

Web links

Commons : Themistocles von Eckenbrecher  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Inventory list , website on the malkasten.org portal , accessed on September 13, 2014.
  2. ^ Karin Rhein: German Orientmalerei in the second half of the 19th century. Tenea, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-86504-035-7 , p. 98.
  3. ^ Themistocles von Eckenbrecher at Namibiana.de
  4. ↑ Margarethe von Eckenbrecher: What Africa gave and took from me. Experiences of a German settler woman in South West Africa Mittler, Berlin 1907. Reprint Salzwasser Verlag, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-8460-0597-2 ;
    Margarethe von Eckenbrecher at Namibiana.de
personal data
SURNAME Corner breaker, Themistocles of
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Corner Crusher, Karl Paul Themistocles von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German landscape and marine painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1842
PLACE OF BIRTH Athens
DATE OF DEATH 4th December 1921
Place of death Goslar