Charles-Frédéric Soehnée
Charles -Frédéric Soehnée ( born November 3, 1789 in Landau in der Pfalz as Carl Friederich sons; † May 1, 1878 in Le Pré -Saint -Gervais in Paris) was a French painter and producer of Malfirnissen.
Life
Charles -Frédéric Soehnée was the fourth child of merchant Johann Jakob Friederich sons (Jacques Frédéric Soehnée ) and Caroline Wilhelmine (nee Kruger ) was born 1789 in Landau in der Pfalz.
After his father and his brother Johann Michael sons (Jean -Michel Soehnée ) had done an apprenticeship with the family Pourtàles, a large trading house in Neuchâtel / Switzerland, and where they took over later executive functions, they founded in 1797 the company " Soehnée l' aine & Cie ", the colored and printed fabrics produced. Their factories were located in the cities of Mulhouse, Colmar and Munster in Alsace. They employed more than 1,500 workers there. The company's headquarters was in Paris, where also attracted their families.
In Paris, Charles Frederic sons studied from 1810 in the neoclassical painter Anne Louis Girodet de Roussy - Trioson painting. His classmate and friend Pierre Louis de Laval (1790-1842) painted a portrait of him in 1812. Right intensively Soehnée must deal with the Technique of the old masters and the composition of their mediums have been dealing since 1822, he completed a doctorate on this topic.
Charles -Frédéric Soehnée founded, together with a brother 1829, the company Soehnée Frères in Paris. The company's success earned him numerous awards. Its economic success made him rich and independent, so that he was not dependent on the sale of his pictures.
Soehnée possessed a collection of drawings of the Baroque painter Joseph Parrocel (1646-1704), which is now in the collection of the Louvre.
The artistic work
Until some years ago the sensational and bizarre artistic work of Charles -Frédéric Soehnée was completely unknown, like us at all Charles -Frédéric Soehnée and his work still retains a number puzzle. End of 2008, the German painter Otfried H. Culmann has rediscovered him for the German -speaking public.
Soehnées productive creative phase seems to have been extremely short. All his watercolors found so far are from the period between 1817 bis 1819. Located one has been about seven albums from this period with several hundred watercolor drawings in the format 22 x 35 cm.
The watercolors depict fantastical scenes of nomads in a desolate desert with giant rats, moles, snails, crabs, bird skeletons, pterodactyls, cubes and other strange monstrous creatures, where vestments, wrapped in large, partly ragged people riding. Groups of people who turn their backs to the viewer, can be pull on wagon of dinosaur skeletons. apocalyptic visions of a world in which it is the people so poor that they to the full teats of a gigantic disgusting rat need to quench their thirst at the "first catch ". A group of people, with a desperate cross the swinging priest, has settled on a creeping, giant slug. Title: "Journey to Hell". A bizarre bestiary, with which this last human pile has apparently arranged, until the next night and the next day, where the horror is still horrible.
The scenes look as 've seen Jacques Callot figures from Bosch through the lens of Alfred Kubin. Although Soehnée stood in the presentation of his characters under the influence of Alexandre -Jean Noël (1752-1834), but his visions are absolutely unique.
In fascinating contrast to his macabre picture Subjects virtuoso lightness of his brush stroke and the fragrant delicacy and brightness is its color, which he often painted over with black washes and darkened.
His paintings have titles like Journey to Hell ( Voyage en enfer ), The Cradle of Death ( Le berceau de la mort ) or The Silence consecrated place ( Lieu consacré au silence ), but do little to solve the mystery of these images. A mystery remains why he painted such grotesque visions. One possible explanation is that in 1815 began a worldwide climate change by the eruption of Tambora volcano in Indonesia, and there were years of drought, floods, famine, rats and snails plagues that enabled the people in fear and terror. This dramatic situation could have been a motivation for the painted end of Soehnée visions.
Oil paintings from his hand has not yet been found.
So far, a lithograph by Ch.F.Soehnée was found with two scenes: " road to hell " and " judgment of fate. " These were implemented by the lithographer Godefroy Engelmann, an Alsatian from Mühlhausen, which there in 1814 and in Paris in 1816 a printing company founded and is one of the pioneers of color lithography in France.
Writings
- Charles -Frédéric Soehnée: Recherches sur les nouvelles de peinture procédés the anciens; suivies de la traduction de différents fragments de l' ouvrage de Lessing sur l' antiquité de la peinture à l' huile Paris: JM Eberhart, 1822.