Wilhelm von Kaulbach

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Portrait of Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Photo: Friedrich Bruckmann, Munich, 1864 (Jan Weijers collection, Holland)
Grave of Wilhelm Kaulbach in the old southern cemetery in Munich Location with bronze plate by Lorenz Gedon
Destruction of Jerusalem by Titus
( Neue Pinakothek Munich )
Illustration for Reineke Fuchs
Opening of the crypt of Charlemagne , woodcut in the gazebo

Wilhelm von Kaulbach (born October 15, 1805 in Arolsen ; † April 7, 1874 in Munich ) was a German painter who became known for large wall and ceiling paintings with historical content and literary illustrations.

Life

Wilhelm Kaulbach was the third of four children of Philipp Karl Friedrich Kaulbach (1775–1846) and his wife Therese, nee. Engelbracht born. The father had trained as a goldsmith and die cutter and had taught himself copperplate engraving and oil painting. He often changed his place of residence and felt himself to be a misunderstood artist throughout his life. 1816 had the family moved to Mülheim an der Ruhr devious, where Philipp Karl Friedrich initially a job as an engraver in the textile factory of Johann Caspar Troost found. After his release, he got by with casual artistic work and private drawing lessons, which was not very productive, so that Wilhelm Kaulbach's childhood was marked by poverty.

Wilhelm received his first artistic lessons from his father and studied from 1822 as a pupil of Peter von Cornelius at the Düsseldorf Academy . He was dismissed there in 1826 for fistfights against Jakob Lehnen . Together with his classmates Hermann Anschütz and Adam Eberle , he followed Cornelius to Munich in 1826, where he initially worked on the frescoes in the Odeon , in the Hofgarten arcades and in the Residenz .

In 1831 Kaulbach married the Munich merchant's daughter Josefine Sutner (1809-1896). The marriage resulted in four children, three daughters and the future painter Hermann . In 1835, after the death of his first daughter and in an artistically difficult phase, Kaulbach made his first trip to Italy, which took him to Venice. Numerous drawings and sketches of the Italian landscape were created. Appointed court painter by King Ludwig I of Bavaria in 1837 , Kaulbach was able to travel to Italy again from October 1838 to May 1839, this time as far as Rome.

From 1845 onwards he stayed in Berlin many times, on behalf of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to advance and supervise the painting of the stairwell of the New Museum in Berlin. At the same time, however, he acquired a stately, no longer existing villa in Munich by the Englischer Garten , which became a social and artistic center.

In 1849 he was appointed director of the Munich Art Academy (his students included Gustav Adolf Goldberg and Jacques Alfred van Muyden ), was also a member of the academies of Berlin , Dresden and Brussels and was ennobled in 1866. In 1863 he was accepted as a foreign member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts and in 1870 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In the summer of 1871 he and his wife Josefa went on a bathing trip to the island of Föhr, which has a fixed place in the cultural history of the seaside resort. Kaulbach died of cholera in the great Munich epidemic of 1874 .

tomb

The tomb of Kaulbach is located on the old southern cemetery in Munich (Wall Links Course at 280 burial ground 11) location . The monumental bronze plate that survived the war damage to the tomb comes from Lorenz Gedon , whom Kaulbach's widow had commissioned.

plant

In 1830 he created the drawing Narrenhaus , which was reproduced and famous many times for its sensitive portrayal of the mentally ill. At the same time he was working on his first independent work, completed in 1831, the frescoes of Apulejus' Amor and Psyche in the Herzog-Max-Palais ; placed today in the music department of the Bavarian State Library . Design drawings for this can be found in the Maillinger collection of the Munich City Museum . The drawings of Friedrich Schiller's Criminals from Lost Honor , reproduced as engravings and lithographs, also contributed to the young artist's fame.

Leo von Klenze encouraged Kaulbach to take up the theme of a ghost battle , which goes back to ancient literature . In 1834 the box was finished and the artist was commissioned by the Polish art collector Count Raczyński to carry out the painting. Under the title Hunnenschlacht it finally made him famous and in 1837 led to his appointment as court painter by King Ludwig I of Bavaria . Kaulbach's friend Franz Liszt took this work in 1856 as a template for his 11th symphony of the same name  .

Kaulbach was now one of the most famous history painters of his time and created, among other things, the destruction of Jerusalem for Ludwig I in 1837 , today in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, as well as numerous ceiling and wall paintings with historical, allegorical and mythological representations. In addition, representative portraits were made, for example King Ludwig I as Grand Master of the Order of Hubert , around 1843, today in the possession of the Bavarian State Painting Collections, as well as of famous personalities of his time, such as Franz Liszt , Lola Montez , Max von Pettenkofer and Ludwig von Schwanthaler . Kaulbach is also said to have created at least one series of erotic drawings either for King Ludwig I of Bavaria or a member of the Austrian imperial family.

In 1839/40 he was commissioned by the Stuttgart publisher Georg von Cotta to illustrate Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Reineke Fuchs . Inspired by William Hogarth and Grandville , Kaulbach created 36 main pictures and numerous vignettes by 1847 , which were engraved by Hans Rudolf Rahn and Adrian Schleich. The amazingly humanized animation of the animal world showed Kaulbach's second artistic side, a sense of humor that made him popular beyond his fame as a history painter.

In 1842 planning began for Kaulbach's main work, the pictures of a “world history” in the stairwell of the Neues Museum in Berlin. The completion dragged on until 1865. They were completely destroyed in World War II.

A little later Kaulbach began work on the frescoes at the Neue Pinakothek in Munich with scenes from contemporary German art. In 1859 he painted the fresco Opening of Charlemagne's Crypt in Aachen Cathedral by Emperor Otto III. for the newly emerging Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg ; The original location was the south wall of the Carthusian Church integrated into the museum (moved to the former Hall I in 1920 for conservation reasons, where it was destroyed during demolition work in 1962).

In the 1850s, work began on the again very popular illustrations for the “Goethe Gallery” by the publisher Friedrich Bruckmann .

In the last years of his life, Kaulbach was mainly busy working on the monumental painting “The Battle of Salamis” for the Maximilianeum .

Appreciations

Before 1878 a street in Berlin-Lankwitz was named after him. In 1910 Kaulbachstraße in Groß Flottbek (today Hamburg-Groß Flottbek ) and in 1920 Kaulbachstraße in Vienna - Meidling were named after the painter, in 1926 the street of the same name in Munich , which connects the districts of Maxvorstadt and Schwabing. In Nuremberg's gardens behind the fortress there is a Kaulbachstrasse and a Kaulbachplatz.

relationship

Wilhelm von Kaulbach was the founder of a famous family of painters, including his son Hermann von Kaulbach (1846–1909), his cousin and student Friedrich Kaulbach (1822–1903) and his son Friedrich August von Kaulbach (1850–1920).

Illustrations (selection)

literature

  • Friedrich Pecht :  Kaulbach, Wilhelm Ritter von . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 15, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1882, pp. 478-484.
  • Otto Zirk:  Kaulbach, Wilhelm Ritter von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 11, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-428-00192-3 , p. 356 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Kaulbach, Wilhelm von . In: Friedrich von Boetticher : painter works of the nineteenth century. Contribution to art history . Volume I, Dresden 1891, p. 659 ff .; Text archive - Internet Archive
  • Anna Mary Howitt: The Studio of Wilhelm von Kaulbach. In: To an art student in Munich. Volume 1. Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, London 1853 ( google.de/books )
  • Anna Mary Howitt: Magnificent city of art Munich. Letters from an English art student 1850–1852. Verl.-Anst. Bayerland, Dachau 2002, ISBN 3-89251-322-8 .
  • Wilh. v. Kaulbach, Echter , Muhr : Kaffee-Klexbilder: Humorous hand drawings . Reproduced in collotype by W. Frisch. Schloemp, Leipzig 1881, digitized .
  • Fritz von Ostini : Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Velhagen & Klasing, Bielefeld 1906.
  • L. Névinny: Wilhelm von Kaulbach (= People's Books of Art. 83). Velhagen & Klasing, Bielefeld 1913.
  • Josefa Dürck-Kaulbach: Memories of Wilhelm von Kaulbach and his house. Delphin-Verlag Munich, 1918.
  • Karl Deicke : Kaulbach memories in Mülheim an der Ruhr. In: Journal of the Mülheim an der Ruhr History Association. Volume 26 (1932), pp. 12-27.
  • Evelyn Lehmann, Elke Riemer: The Kaulbachs. A family of artists from Arolsen. Waldeck Historical Society, Arolsen 1978.
  • Jochen Zink: The first picture in the “Kaulbach Gallery”. A missing drawing by Wilhelm von Kaulbach in the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing. In: Pantheon. International Art Journal. Volume 62 (1984), pp. 347-357.
  • Annemarie Menke-Schwinghammer: World history as a "national epic ". Wilhelm von Kaulbach's cultural-historical cycle in the stairwell of the Neues Museum in Berlin. (Dissertation University of Bonn 1987) German publishing house for art history, Berlin 1994
  • Wolfram Steinbeck : Music based on pictures. To Franz Liszt's Hunnenschlacht. In: Elisabeth Schmierer u. a. (Ed.): Tones, colors, shapes. About music and the fine arts. Laaber 1998, pp. 17-38.
  • Birgit Kümmel : Wilhelm von Kaulbach as a draftsman . Museum, Bad Arolsen 2001, ISBN 3-930930-09-9 .
  • Miriam Waldvogel: Wilhelm Kaulbach's Narrenhaus (around 1830). On the picture of madness in the Biedermeier period (= LMU publications / history and art studies; No. 18). Ludwig Maximilians University, Munich 2007 ( epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de )
  • Elke Blauert (Ed.): New Museum - Architecture, Collection, History. Berlin 2009.
  • Margret Dorothea Minkels : The founders of the New Museum Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia and Elisabeth of Baiern. Norderstedt 2012, ISBN 978-3-8448-0212-2 .
  • Albrecht Geck : “We have to paint history” - Luther and Melanchthon in Wilhelm von Kaulbach's monumental painting “The Age of the Reformation” (1864). In: Günter Frank, Maria Lucia Weigel (Ed.): Reformation and portrait. Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg 2018, pp. 197–215.

Further sources:

  • Karl Stieler: Kaulbach's youth. Supplement to the Allgemeine Zeitung Augsburg, 1875, No. 218, 220 u. 221.
  • Karl Deicke: Wilhelm von Kaulbach. A local history commemorative sheet for his 100th birthday. In: General-Anzeiger für Mülheim-Ruhr , 1904, no. 252 u. 253.
  • KA Dp – ff .: A new dance of death . In: The Gazebo . Issue 26, 1867, pp. 405, 407–408 ( full text [ Wikisource ] - illustrated).

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm von Kaulbach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ after Otto Zirk:  Kaulbach, Wilhelm Ritter von. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 11, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1977, ISBN 3-428-00192-3 , p. 356 f. ( Digitized version ). The year of his birth is unclear; 1804 is also often given.
  2. ↑ zeno.org
  3. ^ Bettina Baumgärtel : Chronicle of the Düsseldorf School of Painting 1815–2011 . In: Bettina Baumgärtel (Hrsg.): The Düsseldorf School of Painting and its international impact 1819–1918 . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86568-702-9 , Volume 1, p. 355
  4. ↑ Ulrich Schulte-Wülwer, painter on Föhr, Amrum and the Halligen, Heide 2012, pp. 68–70.
  5. ↑ cf. Old southern cemetery in Munich, Franz Schiermeier - Florian Scheungraber - overview plan of the tombs, ISBN 978-3-9811425-6-3 .
  6. ↑ cf. Art and Memoria. The old southern cemetery in Munich Claudia Denk, John Ziesemer, 2014, p. 258.
  7. ↑ cf. Wolfram Steinbeck. Music based on pictures. To Franz Liszt's Hunnenschlacht . In: Elisabeth Schmierer u. a. (Ed.): Tones, colors, shapes. About music and the fine arts . Laaber 1998. pp. 17-38.
  8. ↑ See: Menke-Schwinghammer 1994 (bibliography); as well as: Margret Dorothea Minkels: The founders of the Neues Museum Friedrich Wilhelm IV. von Prussen and Elisabeth von Baiern. Norderstedt 2012, pp. 255-282, p. 486.
  9. ↑ Kaulbachstrasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  10. ↑ Rita Bake : A Memory of the City. Streets, squares, bridges named after women and men , Volume 3, as of December 2017, p. 773; uni-hamburg.de (PDF)
  11. ↑ bad-arolsen.de (PDF; 872 kB).
personal data
SURNAME Kaulbach, Wilhelm von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter
DATE OF BIRTH 1804 or October 15, 1805
PLACE OF BIRTH Arolsen
DATE OF DEATH April 7, 1874
Place of death Munich