.
Carl Spitzweg
5th February 1808 – 23th September 1885
Carl Spitzweg was born on 5th of February in 1808 in Unterpfaffenhofen, Bavaria. Although trained as a chemist, he discovered quite early his talent for drawing and his affinity with art. Spitzweg travelled extensively during his lifetime and the impressions formed by his travels greatly influenced his work. Shortly after completing his studies in pharmaceutics in 1832, he visited Italy. It was particularly in the cities of Florence, Rome, and Naples that he discovered the many significant works of Western culture which were to leave a permanent imprint on him.
A severe case of dysentery in 1833 strengthened his resolve to abandon his career as a chemist and he proceeded to commit himself solely to his painting. In June 1835, he became a member of the Munich Art Association and travelled that same year to southern Tirol with the landscape painter Eduard Schleich, the Elder.
In 1839 he completed his first painting entitled ''The Poor Poet'. Although this recurring motif would later be considered his most well-known body of work, the painting was not accepted at this time by the jury of the Munich Art Association.
As regards his graphic production, the first publication in 1844 of his own illustrations in the Munich weekly paper 'Fliegende Blätter' is considered quite significant. His visits to the Industrial Exposition in Paris and the World's Fair exhibition in London in 1851 were his first contact with the Oriental scenes which would begin to inform his work.
To the deserving painter were bestowed numerous honours during the second half of Spitzweg's lifetime: in 1865 the Bavarian Royal Merit Order of St. Michael was conferred upon him, and in 1875 he was named an honorary member of the Academy of Fine Arts.
Carl Spitzweg died on 23th of September in 1885 and was entombed in the historic South Cemetery in Munich.
He leaves behind a body of work dedicated to the townspeople who inhibit his genre scenes, and with acute and pointed, but never ill-natured humour he portrays the everday bourgeois life of his time.
Lit: Siegfried Wichmann, Carl Spitzweg. Verzeichnis der Werke, Gemälde und Aquarelle, Stuttgart: Belser, 2002.
Carl Spitzweg
Results of your search
Matches:
1/6 overview 
| continue 
| send e-mail 
| Survey of the artists
 |
3267
Winterauktionen 19.–20.11.2021
Keller, Ferdinand
1842 Karlsruhe - 1922 Baden-Baden.
Baroque portal and cypresses on a Mediterranean shore.
Oil on canvas. Signed lower left and dated 1898. Verso on a label handwritten numbered «13».
H 124,
An ethereal female figure, cloaked like an antique column, pensive and deeply immersed in unfathomable thoughts, stands, as if sprung from the shadowy realm of a Homeric heroic epic, at the mysterious, cypress-covered bay of a dimly abysmal lyrical fantasy landscape, a place where time seems to stand still.
This almost otherworldly, ghostly dream world, idealised to elegant aloofness, springs from the dark, diffuse light and intoxicating, sultry musky haze of the sophisticated salon world of the late
In his later work, Ferdinand Keller abandoned the opulently staged heroism and pompous character of his history painting. Instead he devoted himself to an examination of his contemporary model, the symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, who inspired him to create transcendent dream visions of a Mediterranean-antique character with a sombre, occult quality. Above all, Böcklin's most influential and enduringly successful pictorial invention, «The Isle of the Dead», an incunabulum of the late Romantic longing for death and of the decadent «fin de siècle», inspired the professor at the Akademie Karlsruhe to create this hitherto unknown masterpiece, which has remained in aristocratic private ownership since its creation.
Authentication: We would like to thank Dr. Michael Koch, author of the catalogue raisonné, for the authentication and scientific consultation via
Provenance: according to the consignor purchased directly from the artist; since then private property of the family of Neveu, Durbach.
Catalogue raisonné: Koch 328, 357 (cf.).
Condition report 