Wilhelm Hensel

Wilhelm Hensel ( born July 6, 1794 in Trebbin, † November 26, 1861 in Berlin) was a German painter and portraitist.

Life

Hensel was the son of the pastor Ludwig Hensel and his wife Johanna Albertina consolation. His younger sister Louisa Maria was a very successful writer. After his first lessons from his father Hensel attended school in his hometown.

With 15 years Hensel began in 1809 to study at the Berlin Academy of Architecture, but he dropped out after a few semesters. In 1811 he turned to the art academy. A. Frisch, his teacher of anatomy and perspective, enabling him the following year to take part in the big annual exhibition of the Academy. Hensel's work of Christ on the Mount of Olives was praised discussed by art critics and awarded by the jury.

The liberation war broke Hensel further studies. In 1813 he volunteered for the army. Until 1815, he fought among others in the Battle of Bautzen and in the Battle of Leipzig and was wounded several times. 1813 and 1815 Hensel was during the invasion of Paris there. The conclusion of the second peace of Paris he witnessed. Both stays in this city, he used to study the local art treasures in museums.

On his return to Berlin, Hensel was a painter and portraitist soon have access to the courtyard. In 1821 he helped significantly to make a feast in honor of the Russian Tsar Alexander I.. Inspired by the poem Lalla Rookh ( Thomas Moore) designed Hensel living pictures with people of the invited guests. Of these productions, he then created twelve watercolors, which as etchings found widespread use later. Since this festival was a great success, the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III thanked. with a generous travel grant. This made it Hensel allows to reside 1823-1828 in Rome. He studied the ancient masters, but also showed great interest in the contemporary art world. Hensel copied including works by Raphael. One of his most successful works was Christ and the Samaritan woman.

In the fall of 1828 Hensel returned to Germany and settled in Berlin as a freelance painter down. From the courtyard, he soon got larger orders: among other things he adorned together with Heinrich Dähling, Kolbe, Wilhelm von Schadow and Christian Friedrich Tieck several rooms of the Berlin Schauspielhaus from.

In 1829, Hensel married in Berlin, the musician and composer Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy, a daughter of the banker Abraham Mendelssohn and sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. With her ​​Hensel lived in the home of his parents Mendelssohn. The directed by their " Sunday Concerts " in the garden room of the house attracted to the artistic and intellectual prominence of Berlin. With Fanny Hensel had a son, Ludwig Felix Sebastian, called Sebastian. . For Fanny he wrote the morning greeting, which they published in 1846 as a cappella choir set to music in her garden songs.

Hensel hosted at receptions and salons at home and also a regular guest in preferably two circles. At the meetings of the lawyer Julius Eduard Hitzig, among others, the writer Adelbert von Chamisso, Helmina of Chezy, ETA Hoffmann, Ernst von Houwald, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and the virtuoso pianist and composer Ludwig Berger met. When Friedrich August von Staegemann he met Clemens Brentano, Ferdinand von Bülow, the brothers Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach and Ludwig Friedrich Leopold von Gerlach, Amalie von Hellwig, Max von Schenkendorfstraße and Wilhelm Müller. In the living room of the family of Staegemann Hensel had repeatedly 1815th With the at that time 16 -year-old daughter of the house Hedwig, as Salonnière Hedwig von Olfers later came to prominence, he remained on friendly terms. Hensel was a participant in a self-written by the young visitors of salon society songs play Rose, the miller that can The Beautiful Miller are considered as precursors of Schubert's cycle. The interspersed in the game songs were set to music in 1816 by Ludwig Berger, who made Hensel Luise Hensel sister the yard as a cycle - long before Franz Schubert.

1829 appointed to the Royal court painter Hensel and elected him to the board of the Academy of Arts. The political turmoil of the German revolution of 1848 could Hensel again become politically active. In the spring of 1848 he became the head of an armed Artist Corps and worked as such for the Conservative Party ( Prussia).

At the age of 67 years Wilhelm Hensel died on 26 November 1861 in Berlin. He was buried alongside his wife in the family grave in the cemetery of the Mendelssohn Bartholdy I of Trinity Church in Berlin- Kreuzberg. His final resting place is a grave of honor of the State of Berlin.

Reception

Hensel had less through his paintings as his portraits. His early oil paintings are influenced primarily Nazarene; also traces of ancient masters can be found. His body of work is thematically marked by a romanticized realism.

His portraits approached with time more and more of a photographic accuracy, but without losing its softness. Hensel himself always saw in his portraits of the documentation of the person and never a somehow aligned artistic ability. To date, over 1,000 portraits of famous ( with pen and sepia) contemporaries of the Berlin Romanticism have received.

His etchings were often commissioned works, such as the illustrations to Genoveva or Phantasus by Johann Ludwig Tieck.

Literary him by Theodor Fontane is set in the last chapter of his wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg, a monument. Fontane described the painter: " Wilhelm Hensel belonged entirely to the group Mark Brandenburg men, headed than most pronounced type, the old Schadow was. Natures, which may be regarded as doppellebig, as an amalgamation of bluntness and beauty of Gamaschentum and drapery, of Prussian militarism and classical idealism. The Greek soul, the spirit altenfritzisch, the character of the Brandenburg March. The character then corresponded usually also the outward appearance. The peculiarity of this more and more endangered types Schadow was that the trains and contradictions of her character were next to each other in equal force, while for example in Schinkel and Winckelmann Greek almost completely triumphed over the märkische. In Hensel everything stayed in balance; none of these heterogeneous elements, expressed or dominated the others and the Neuuniformierung a Guard regiment or a witticism of Professor Gans interested him as vividly as the purchase of a Raphael. "

ETA Hoffmann outlined in the narrative, the bride's choice, the figure of the painter Wilhelm Hensel Lehsen after.

Works ( incomplete)

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