Wilhelm Hensel
Wilhelm Hensel (born July 6, 1794 in Trebbin ; † November 26, 1861 in Berlin ) was a German painter and portraitist and the husband of the composer Fanny Hensel .
Life
Hensel was the second child and only son of Pastor Johann Jacob Ludwig Hensel (1763-1809) and his wife Johanna Albertina Louise Trost (1764-1835). At the time of his birth, his father was the second preacher in Trebbin responsible for the Thyrow village church , and in 1796 he took over the pastoral position in Linum . It was there that his younger sister Louisa Maria , a very successful writer, was born. After first lessons from his father, Hensel attended school in his hometown.
After the death of his father in 1809, at the age of 15, Hensel began studying at the Berlin Building Academy , which he broke off after a few semesters. In 1811 he moved to the art academy . A. Frisch, his teacher of anatomy and perspective , made it possible for him to take part in the Academy's big annual exhibition the following year. Hensel's work Christ on the Mount of Olives received praise from the art critics and was recognized by the jury.
The Wars of Liberation interrupted Hensel's further studies. In 1813 he volunteered for the army. Until 1815 he fought in the Battle of Bautzen and in the Battle of Nations near Leipzig and was wounded several times. In 1813 and 1815 Hensel was there when he marched into Paris . He saw the Second Peace of Paris come about. He used both stays in this city to study the art treasures there in the museums.
After returning to Berlin, Hensel soon found access to the court as a painter and portraitist. In 1821 he played a key role in organizing a festival in honor of the Russian Tsar Alexander I. Inspired by the poem Lalla Rookh ( Thomas Moore ), Hensel designed living pictures with a group of invited guests. He then created twelve watercolors from these productions , which were later widely used as etchings . Since this festival was a great success, the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III thanked . with a generous travel grant. This made it possible for Hensel to stay in Rome between 1823 and 1828 . In Rome, Hensel made a drawing of his friend August Grahl , which was later found in the diary of Auguste Charlotte von Kielmannsegge . Hensel studied the ancient masters there, but also showed great interest in the contemporary art business. Hensel copied works by Raffael , among others . One of his successful works was Christ and the Samaritan Woman .
In the fall of 1828 Hensel returned to Germany and settled in Berlin as a freelance painter. He soon received major orders from the court: among other things, he decorated several halls of the Berlin theater together with Heinrich Dähling , Karl Wilhelm Kolbe , Wilhelm von Schadow and Christian Friedrich Tieck . In 1829 Hensel was appointed royal court painter and elected to the board of the art academy.
In 1829 Hensel married the musician and composer Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy , a daughter of the banker Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy and sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy . Hensel lived with her in the house of Mendelssohn's in-laws. The “Sunday concerts” she directed in the garden hall of the house attracted the artistic and intellectual celebrities of Berlin. With Fanny, Hensel had a son, Sebastian . For Fanny he composed the morning greeting , which she set to music as an a cappella choir in her garden songs in 1846 .
Hensel hosted receptions and salons at home and was also a regular guest in preferably two circles. At the meetings of the lawyer Julius Eduard Hitzig , the writers Adelbert von Chamisso , Helmina von Chézy , ETA Hoffmann , Ernst von Houwald , Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and the piano virtuoso and composer Ludwig Berger met, among others . At Friedrich August von Staegemann's he met Clemens Brentano , Ferdinand von Bülow , the brothers Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach and Ludwig Friedrich Leopold von Gerlach , Amalie von Helvig , Max von Schenkendorf and Wilhelm Müller . Hensel visited the von Staegemann family salon as early as 1815. He remained on friendly terms with the then 16-year-old daughter of the house, Hedwig, who later became famous as Salonnière Hedwig von Olfers . Hensel took part in a social song play Rose, die Müllerin , written by the young visitors to the salon themselves , which can be regarded as the forerunner of Schubert's cycle Die Schöne Müllerin (texts: Wilhelm Müller). The songs interspersed in the play were set to music as a cycle in 1816 by Ludwig Berger, who was courting Hensel's sister Luise - a decade before Franz Schubert .
Fanny's sudden death in 1847 was a severe blow to him. The political turmoil of the German revolution of 1848 made Hensel politically active again. In the spring of 1848 he took the lead in an armed artist corps and as such worked for the Conservative Party (Prussia) .
Wilhelm Hensel died on November 26, 1861 in Berlin at the age of 67. He was buried at the side of his wife in the family grave of the Mendelssohn Bartholdys in Cemetery I of the Trinity Church in Berlin-Kreuzberg . His final resting place is an honorary grave of the State of Berlin .
reception
Hensel was less effective through his paintings than through his portraits. His early oil paintings are mainly influenced by the Nazarene ; Traces of the ancient masters can also be found. His entire work is thematically dominated by a romanticizing realism.
In the course of time, his portraits approached more and more photographic accuracy without losing their delicacy. Hensel himself always saw the documentation of the person in his portraits and never any kind of directed artistic possibility. To date, over 1000 portraits (with pen and sepia) of famous contemporaries of Berlin Romanticism have survived.
His etchings were often commissioned work, such as the illustrations for Genoveva or Phantasus by Johann Ludwig Tieck .
In literary terms, Theodor Fontane erected a memorial to him in the last chapter of his hikes through the Mark Brandenburg . Fontane described the painter:
“Wilhelm Hensel belonged entirely to that group of Brandenburg men, at the head of which, as the most distinctive type, was old Schadow. Natures that can be seen as double-lived, as a mixture of coarseness and beauty, of gauntlet and drapery, of Prussian militarism and classical idealism. The soul is Greek, the spirit is old-fashioned, the character is Brandenburg. The character then mostly corresponded to the outward appearance. The peculiarity of these more and more dying Schadow types was that the traits and opposites of their character were maintained side by side in equal force, while in Schinkel and Winckelmann, for example, Greek almost completely triumphed over Markish. At Hensel everything stayed in balance; none of these heterogeneous elements pressed or dominated the other and the new uniform of a guard regiment or a joke of Professor Gans interested him as much as the purchase of a Raphael. "
ETA Hoffmann sketched the figure of the painter Lehsen after Wilhelm Hensel in the story Die Brautwahl .
Works (incomplete)
literature
- Covenant blossoms . Berlin 1816.
- Knight Hans (comedy)
painting
- Christ on the Mount of Olives (1812)
- Christ and the Samaritan Woman
- Vittoria Caldoni of Albano in front of the monastery
- Christ in the desert
- Emperor Wenceslaus
- Italian country people at the ancient well
- Mirjam opening the dance of virgins (1836)
- Christ before Pilate (1834, garrison church in Berlin)
- The Duke of Braunschweig at the Brussels Ball before the battle of Quatre-Bras
- Portrait of King Friedrich Wilhelm III. , 1817 (copy after François Gérard )
literature
- Heinrich Brauer : Hensel, Wilhelm. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-428-00189-3 , p. 562 f. ( Digitized version ).
- Rudolf Elvers , Hans-Günter Klein (ed.): The Mendelssohns in Berlin. A family and their city . Reichert-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1983, ISBN 3-88226-185-4 (an exhibition in the Mendelssohn archive of the State Library PK 1984, with a family tree of male lines up to the seventh generation).
- Fanny Hensel (author), Hans-Günter Klein (ed.): Letters from Rome to her family in Berlin 1839/40 . Reichert, Wiesbaden 2002, ISBN 3-89500-324-7 .
- Fanny Hensel (author), Hans-Günter Klein (ed.): Letters from Venice and Naples to her family in Berlin 1839/40 . Reichert, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-89500-387-5 .
- Fanny Hensel (author), Hans-Günter Klein (ed.): Rudolf Elvers (ed.): Diaries . Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden 2002, ISBN 3-7651-0369-1 .
- Sebastian Hensel: The Mendelssohn Family 1729-1847. After letters and diaries . Insel, Frankfurt / M. 1995, ISBN 3-458-33371-1 (reprint of the Berlin 1908 edition).
- Hans-Günter Klein (Ed.): O happy, rich only days. Fanny and Wilhelm Hensel's Italian trip. With the facsimile of the image pages from the "Travel Album 1839-1840" . Reichert, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 3-89500-482-0 .
- Cécile Lowenthal-Hensel : Europe in portrait. Drawings by Wilhelm Hensel (1794-1861) . Gebr. Mann, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-7861-1994-5 (2 volumes)
- Cécile Lowenthal-Hensel, Rudolf Elvers, Hans-Günter Klein and Christoph Schulte (eds.): Mendelssohn studies. Contributions to recent cultural history . Wehrhahn, Hanover 1972 ff.
- Cécile Lowenthal-Hensel, Jutta Arnold: Wilhelm Hensel, painter and portraitist 1794-1861. A contribution to the cultural history of the 19th century . Gebr. Mann, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-7861-1995-3 .
- Fritz Weege : Hensel, Wilhelm . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 16 : Hansen – Heubach . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1923, p. 431-433 .
- Joseph Eduard Wessely , Robert Eitner: Hensel, Wilhelm . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1880, pp. 3-6.
Web links
- Literature by and about Wilhelm Hensel in the catalog of the German National Library
- Works by and about Wilhelm Hensel in the German Digital Library
- Search for "Wilhelm Hensel" in the SPK digital portal of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation
- Mendelssohn Society V.
- About his biography
- Picture by Wilhelm Hensel in the Austrian National Library
- Comprehensive genealogy of the Mendelssohn Bartholdys and the Hensels
Individual evidence
- ↑ Franz Flaskamp: Wilhelm Hensel - A Contribution to Luise Hensel Research, p. 292 lwl.org (PDF, accessed on August 12, 2017)
- ↑ Drawing by August Grahl , by Wilhelm Hensel in Rome in 1828, from the Kielmannsegge diary, Museum Lübbenau, at Deutsche Fotothek, accessed on February 26, 2017.
- ^ Eva Weissweiler: Female composers from the Middle Ages to the present. Bärenreiter, DTV Munich 1999, ISBN 3-423-30726-9 , pp. 191–212, here p. 201.
- ↑ Ludwig Felix Sebastian Hensel, * 16. June 1830 in Berlin; † January 13, 1898 ibid. He is the author of The Mendelssohn Family 1729–1847. 1879, 15th edition. 1911. There is an English translation.
- ↑ garnisonfriedhof-berlin.de ( 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. Quotation from a website about the painters in the Berlin Garrison Church
- ↑ François Gérard's painting Friedrich Wilhelm III ( 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. ; Alfons Fritz: Historical information on the pictures of Napoléon and his wife Josephine in the Suermondt Museum. In: Anton Kisa (ed.): Memorandum on the occasion of the twenty-five year existence of the Suermondt Museum. Aachen 1903, p. 52.
personal data | |
---|---|
SURNAME | Hensel, Wilhelm |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German painter and portraitist |
DATE OF BIRTH | July 6, 1794 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Trebbin |
DATE OF DEATH | November 26, 1861 |
Place of death | Berlin |