Hermann Wislicenus (20 September 1825 – 25 April 1899) was a German historical painter. He is chiefly known for his

mural A mural is any piece of graphic artwork that is painted or applied directly to a wall, ceiling or other permanent substrate. Mural techniques include fresco, mosaic, graffiti and marouflage. Word mural in art The word ''mural'' is a Spanis ...

paintings in the

Imperial Palace of Goslar The Imperial Palace of Goslar (german: link=no, Kaiserpfalz Goslar) is a historical building complex at the foot of the Rammelsberg hill in the south of the town of Goslar north of the Harz mountains, central Germany. It covers an area of about ...

Biography

Born in

Eisenach Eisenach () is a town in Thuringia, Germany with 42,000 inhabitants, located west of Erfurt, southeast of Kassel and northeast of Frankfurt. It is the main urban centre of western Thuringia and bordering northeastern Hessian regions, situat ...

in the

Thuringia Thuringia (; german: Thüringen ), officially the Free State of Thuringia ( ), is a state of central Germany, covering , the sixth smallest of the sixteen German states. It has a population of about 2.1 million. Erfurt is the capital and lar ...

n Duchy of

Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (german: Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach) was a historical German state, created as a duchy in 1809 by the merger of the Ernestine duchies of Saxe-Weimar and Saxe-Eisenach, which had been in personal union since 1741. It was ra ...

, Wislicenus studied at the

Dresden Academy of Fine Arts The Dresden Academy of Fine Arts (German ''Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden''), often abbreviated HfBK Dresden or simply HfBK, is a vocational university of visual arts located in Dresden, Germany. The present institution is the produc ...

and later became a student of Eduard Bendemann and Julius Schnorr. His first art work, “Abundance and Destitution,” was purchased by the

Dresden Gallery Dresden (, ; Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; wen, label= Upper Sorbian, Drježdźany) is the capital city of the German state of Saxony and its second most populous city, after Leipzig. It is the 12th most populous city of Germany, the fourth lar ...

in 1853. A stipend from the Grand Duke of Weimar enabled him to study in Italy (1853–1857) where he lived in Rome and became a follower of

Peter von Cornelius Peter von Cornelius (23 September 1783, Düsseldorf – 6 March 1867, Berlin) was a German painter; one of the main representatives of the Nazarene movement. Life Early years Cornelius was born in Düsseldorf. From the age of twelve he attend ...

and the

Nazarene movement The epithet Nazarene was adopted by a group of early 19th-century German Romantic painters who aimed to revive spirituality in art. The name Nazarene came from a term of derision used against them for their affectation of a biblical manner of c ...

. Upon his return to Germany, he settled in

Weimar Weimar is a city in the state of Thuringia, Germany. It is located in Central Germany between Erfurt in the west and Jena in the east, approximately southwest of Leipzig, north of Nuremberg and west of Dresden. Together with the neighbouri ...

and opened his own studio. In Spring 1868, he was appointed professor at the Düsseldorf Academy. In 1872 several of his works perished in a devastating fire and were re-created by Wislicenus in the following years.

Works

In an 1877 competition for the decoration of the restored Goslar ''Kaiserpfalz'', he won the first prize, and, assisted by some of his pupils, within twenty years completed a series of 68 frescoes postulating a continuity of

imperial Imperial is that which relates to an empire, emperor, or imperialism. Imperial or The Imperial may also refer to: Places United States * Imperial, California * Imperial, Missouri * Imperial, Nebraska * Imperial, Pennsylvania * Imperial, Texas ...

rule from

Charlemagne Charlemagne ( , ) or Charles the Great ( la, Carolus Magnus; german: Karl der Große; 2 April 747 – 28 January 814), a member of the Carolingian dynasty, was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and the first E ...

to the

Prussian Prussia, , Old Prussian: ''Prūsa'' or ''Prūsija'' was a German state on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. It formed the German Empire under Prussian rule when it united the German states in 1871. It was ''de facto'' dissolved by an e ...

-led

German Empire The German Empire (),Herbert Tuttle wrote in September 1881 that the term "Reich" does not literally connote an empire as has been commonly assumed by English-speaking people. The term literally denotes an empire – particularly a hereditary ...

. In the course of

German unification The unification of Germany (, ) was the process of building the modern German nation state with federal features based on the concept of Lesser Germany (one without multinational Austria), which commenced on 18 August 1866 with adoption of t ...

, the Imperial Palace, after century-long decay, was under restoration since 1868. Wislicenus's pictorial agenda became an icon of the Romantic recourse to medieval traditions that served the inner identity of the ' Lesser German' Reich established in 1871. Among other oil paintings, watercolors, and cartoons, he executed "Night With Its Retinue," for the Grand Duke of Weimar, the "Myth of Prometheus" (1862, Leipzig Museum), "The Flood of Deucalion" (1865, Weimar Museum); the mural paintings "Brutus as Judge of his Sons" and "The Mother of the Gracchi," in the staircase of the Härtel Roman House at

Leipzig Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as ...

; "Fancy Borne by the Dreams" (Schaek Gallery, Munich); "Angels Singing Psalms," mural painting (Grand-ducal chapel, Weimar). In Düsseldorf, he painted "The Four Seasons" (1877, National Gallery, Berlin).

Sources

* * Siegfried Gehrecke: ''Hermann Wislicenus 1825–1899'', Verlag Erich Goltze, Göttingen 1987,

External links

Hermann Wislicenus
at artfact.com {{DEFAULTSORT:Wislicenus, Hermann 1825 births 1899 deaths People from Eisenach 19th-century German painters 19th-century German male artists Academic staff of Kunstakademie Düsseldorf German history painters German male painters 19th-century painters of historical subjects