Johann Carl Enslen

Johann Carl Enslen ( born May 20, 1759 in Stuttgart, † December 10, 1848 in Dresden ) was a German travel painter, showman, panoramas designer and pioneer of aviation such as photography.

Life

Enslen led a wandering life as a traveling painter and showmen at fairs, where his technical skills and his skills as a " mechanic " was the main focus during labor the artistic realization of gravity ago was initially closer to his brother and later with his son. It was determined by the first balloon flight Montgolfières and let himself together with his brother, the painter Gottfried Christian Enslen, from 1784 ( the first time in Strasbourg ) balloons go up, which were painted by him and his brother some with allegorical figures. He moved with his exhibits about the fairs and was present for example in 1788 and 1792 in Vienna as well as 1793 in Breslau. About his appearance in Lübeck in 1789 reported Johann Rudolph Becker:

" 1789 October 8 was the Mechanicus Enslen different colossalische figures, which were angefüllet with inflammable air, rise to the civil - Schützenhofe in the air. First, he sent preceded a balloon afterwards followed a wild pig, which was persecuted by a dog; then a Reuter came on horseback, which nacheilete as a hunter sent ahead the figures; the way in which for a hunt in the air was vorgestellet. Sämmtliche figures soared to such a height that they disappeared from the eyes of the spectators. "

Enslen settled in 1795 in Oliva, near Danzig and operated a foundry. He received at the latest on the schooling of his son Karl Georg Enslen contact the Director of the School of Arts Gdansk Johann Adam Breysig with a passion for panoramas and, albeit mistakenly, believed to be the inventor of this new form of landscape presentation.

In 1811 the family moved to Berlin in order to fully exploit the talent of painting son. Enslen opened a visually - cosmoranische institution in the French 38, an optical Cabinet, in which he held spectacular experimental demonstrations and the inspired, among others, ETA Hoffmann. The son was adopted as a painter at the Berlin Academy (and later their member), bringing the total family knew how to handle the marketing. The Enslen family in the late 1810s, specializing in semi-circular proffered panoramas, especially European capitals that were all over Germany fairground attractions.

Enslen moved to Dresden in 1834. In the spring of 1839 he began ( at the age of 80 years ) with photographic experiments on the model of Thomas Wedgwood and William Henry Fox Talbot. He is regarded as the first paper prints produced in Germany. He used his life no camera, but made ​​the talbotype related fotogenische drawings, nature and buildings or people combined.

Writings

• Views and conjectures that the air envelope which surrounds the globe except the ball arched refraction ... still an unknown peculiar light beam refraction must have like a hollow sphere ( etc. ), gardener, Dresden 1834. ( Digitized BSB Munich)
• Attempt to explain the nature of light from its manifestations. Dresden, Leipzig: Arnold 1841.