Heinrich Dreber, Gen. Franz-Dreber Lot n° 57

Heinrich Dreber, Gen. Franz-Dreber, Forest landscape with Genoveva and the guardian angel. Oil on canvas. (1868). 140,5 x 100,5 cm. Signed lower left. Framed. The legend of Genoveva of Brabant was a material quite to the taste of the Romantics - at the time of Charles Martell, the Palgrave Siegfried of Trier had married the Brabant duke's daughter Genoveva and they lived happily together until Siegfried had to go to war. He left his wife in the care of his confidant Golo, who made Genoveva offers, which she, however, rejected. Offended by the rejection, Golo accuses her of adultery and points to her now visible pregnancy - in reality, she had conceived the child the night before Siegfried's farewell. Nevertheless, Golo succeeds in convincing Siegfried of his wife's infidelity, and she is consequently sentenced to death. Out of pity, however, the executioners banish her to the wilderness of the forest, where she alone, together with her child, finds solace in the Christian faith - her faithfulness is rewarded, God sends her the hind that nourishes her son, and after years Siegfried finds his wife again while hunting. Convinced of her innocence, he asks her forgiveness and leads her to his castle, where she soon dies. This story about life and death, about turmoil and the abyss of human activity, this tale full of twists and surprises struck at the heart of the Romantic world of feeling - Ludwig Tieck had already told the "Life and Death of St. Genoveva" as a tragedy in 1800 in his "Romantic Poems" and thus also found ample resonance in the visual arts - Joseph Führich created 15 "Pictures of Tieck's Genoveva" in 1824/25 (today Prague, National Gallery), and it was preceded as early as 1806 by a series of engravings by the Göttingen brothers Franz and Johannes Riepenhausen, followed by adaptations of the material by Moritz von Schwind up to Ludwig Richter, who completed his painting "Genoveva in der Waldeinsamkeit" (Hamburg Kunsthalle) in 1841. At that time, his most important student, Heinrich Franz Dreber, was still in Richter's studio, and it is certain that Dreber followed the creation of the painting for several years before settling in Rome. Twenty-five years later, when Romanticism had long since been superseded by other intellectual movements, Dreber, too, was to deal with this subject matter in 1865, as the perfectionist of Romantic thought, as it were. Otto Wesendonck, a merchant and patron of Richard Wagner in Zurich, had already commissioned him to create eight landscape paintings for the music room in his newly built villa. Four landscapes were to show Mediterranean landscapes with elements of ancient mythology and, as a counterpart, four Nordic landscapes depicting scenes from the German saga world. Dreber suggested a forest landscape with Genoveva, which met with enthusiasm in the Wesendonck household, because at that time Wesendonck's wife, the writer and Wagner admirer Mathilde Wesendonck, was herself working on a Genoveva tragedy. In contrast to his teacher Richter, who set his Genoveva in a fairy-tale, romantic "forest solitude" - a term that first appeared in Ludwig Tieck's fairy tale "Der blonde Eckbert" - Dreber's Genoveva is found in a rocky, Nordic-looking ravine with the pictorial grounds merging together, reminiscent less of Richter than of similar imaginative landscapes by his friend Friedrich Preller. The gorge is open, confusing in its varied rock formations, but accessible and not closed off as in Richter's work - only the dark hole leading into a cave on the left still bears witness to the forest solitude. Even the religious content, which Richter still emphasized through his special light direction in the sense of Romanticism, is transformed in Dreber into a genre-like idyll. It is not an introverted Genoveva pondering over faith in the solitude of the forest; she is not alone, she has her child who presents her with a bush of freshly picked flowers. Dreber profanates the sacred theme, reduces it to a genre scene in which wilderness and Arcadian idyll are combined and only the angel still gives an idea of the presence of God. Dr. Preter Prange Schöne 32e. Literature: Richard Schöne, Heinrich Dreber, Berlin 1940, in the chapter "Preserved Pictures", p. 164, cat. no. 32e. Exhibition: First exhibition in the Königliche National-Galerie zu Berlin. Works of the landscape painter Heinrich Franz-Dreber, 1876, no. 6. Provenance: Otto and Mathilde Wesendonck Collection, Zurich; Friedrich Wilhelm von Bissing Collection (grandson of the aforementioned), Agg near Oberaudorf; Grisebach, Berlin, auction, 8.6.2002, lot 131; private property, Austria. Taxation: Differentially taxed (VAT: Margin Scheme).