GERMAN
-
AMERICANARTISTSANDLITHOGRAPHERSIN
EARLYCINCINNATI
incinnati at the beginning of the
nineteenth century has been described
as "an oasis of intellectual and creative
talent west of the Appalachians."¹ A good
part of this talent was concentrated in the
area of art, and by the middle of the last
century Cincinnati had evolved into a
major national art center. Because
Cincinnati attracted many German
immigrants during this period, it is not surprising
that many of the artists who were
active in early Cincinnati were either
German-born or of German descent.
One of the first German artists to settle
in Cincinnati was the painter and sculptor
Frederick Eckstein (1787-1832). A native of
Berlin, Eckstein received training at the
Berlin Academy. After arriving in
Cincinnati in 1823 he was an early teacher
of the celebrated local sculptor Hiram
Powers. Eckstein's sister, Louis Eckstein
Addelsterren, appears to have been the first
notable woman artist in Cincinnati.²
The Swiss-born John Caspar Wild (c.
1804-1846) was another important immigrant
artist in frontier Cincinnati. Although
he was an accomplished painter of portraits
and landscapes, Wild is best remembered
for his work as a lithographic artist. After
working in Cincinnati during the 1820s he
left to work in St. Louis and Davenport.³
A remarkable group of artists in early
Ohio was the Frankenstein family, who
came to Cincinnati from Germany in 1831
and later settled in Springfield, Ohio. The
outstanding talent in the family was
Godfrey Frankenstein (1820-1873), who
supported himself mainly by portrait commissions
but also painted landscapes,
including pictures of the Ohio countryside
and the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
With his brothers George and
Gustavus, he created an immense panoramic
painting of Niagara Falls which was rolled
from one spindle to another while a lecture
was read. Another brother, John Peter
Frankenstein, was an eccentric portrait artist
who also modeled portrait busts. Their two
sisters, Marie and Elizabeth, taught art at a
girls' school in Springfield.4
Henry J. Koempel and Gerhardt
Mueller were two minor local artists who
opened a studio in 1840 for painting altarpieces.
William Lamprecht (b. 1838) was a
painter of historical and religious subjects
who was active in Cincinnati at least from
1853. Lamprecht returned to Germany during
the 1860s to study in Munich but was back
in the United States by around 1867. He
was at one time in partnership with George
Lang, another German-born painter in
Cincinnati. In 1868 both he and Lang were
engaged to do paintings for the church of St.
Romuald D'Echemin in Quebec Province.
Lamprecht was involved with the Institute of
Catholic Art in Lexington and decorated a
number of Benedictine churches. At one time
Lamprecht was also in partnership with
Philip Lang, a German-born portrait painter
in Cincinnati who later settled in Rockport,
Indiana.5 One wonders, of course, whether
George Lang and Philip Lang were related
or perhaps even the same person, but the
record on this point is unclear.
Louis Schwebel, Jr. (b. 1833) was a
minor German-born portrait artist who was
active in Cincinnati in 1850.6 The engraver
C
Cincinnati Artists________________
Hubert Kollmer (b. ca. 1828) was active
there about the same time.7 The Swiss-born
Rudolf Tschudi (1855-1923) established
himself in Cincinnati as a popular painter of
idyllic landscapes who also painted portraits
and historical subjects. The Cincinnati
Historical Society has six of his works and
the Glarus Kunstverein in Switzerland also
has a number of his paintings.8
Several drawings and paintings by
Richard Andriessen, an artist born in
Ratibor, Prussia in 1856, have turned up in
Cincinnati, where he was active at the end
of the last century. Little is known about
him, except that he was married in Germany
and may have studied in Munich.9 Anthony
Biester (1837-1917) was a painter of portraits
and landscapes who came to America
Figure 1: Godfrey Frankenstein (1820-1873), shown here in a self-portrait, was the most noteworthy
member of a family of artists in Ohio (Photo courtesy of William Coyle, Delray Beach, Florida).
—50—
______________________Merrill
in 1870 after having received instruction in
Cleve and Dusseldorf.10
German-trained craftsmen to a great
extent introduced the lithographic process,
which was invented in Germany at the end
of the eighteenth century, into the United
States. With the advent of chromolithography
in 1826, lithography quickly took hold
as both an artistic medium and a commercially
important technology. Although the
lithographic industry in the United States
first developed in Philadelphia and other
eastern cities, German-run lithography
shops soon began to appear in such
Midwestern cities as Cincinnati and
Milwaukee. As elsewhere in the United
States, the early lithography industry in
Cincinnati had a palpably German character.
11
The earliest lithographic firm in
Cincinnati was the partnership of
Klauprecht and Menzel, established some
time prior to 1840. Emil Klauprecht (1815-
1896) was a journalist and writer while
Adolphus Menzel was a skilled lithographer.
12
The firm produced many chromolithographic
views of Cincinnati and other Ohio
towns. In addition it published illustrated
German-language periodicals for which
Klauprecht was the editor and Menzel was
in charge of the illustrations. The lithographer
Charles Menzel, who was active in
Cincinnati in the 1840s, was presumably
related in some way to Adolphus Menzel.
Klauprecht and Menzel employed persons
named Gustavus A. Menzel and Herman G.
Menzel, and by 1856 the name of the firm
had been changed to G. H. Menzel and
Company. The firm disappeared during or
just after the Civil War.
Otto Onken's lithographic establishment,
which existed from about 1848 to
1850, employed several German immigrant
lithographers, including Ferdinand von
Laer, who came to North America from
Berlin around 1850. Peter Ehrgott and
Gustav Forbrigger were also employed by
Onken but later organized their own firm,
Ehrgott and Forbrigger, which produced
chromolithographs of Civil War battles.13
Gustav Herrlein, another German-born
lithographer in Cincinnati, was active about
the same time.14 Christian Fabronius, who
had earlier worked in New York was active
in Cincinnati from 1858 to 1873.15
By the end of the nineteenth century a
generation of American-born artists of
German descent was coming of age in
Cincinnati. We may start by mentioning
three of these artists who achieved national
recognition: Robert Frederick Blum (1857-
1903), Frank Duveneck (1848-1919), and
John Henry Twachtmann (1853-1902).
Blum's father was a native of
Rohrbach, Bavaria, who came to the United
States in the 1850s. Blum's mother was also
of German extraction. Blum himself was
born in Cincinnati, where he began his
career as a lithographer. He worked for a
time in Philadelphia and eventually settled
in New York, where he was known as both a
painter and prolific illustrator. Blum spent
some time in Europe and in 1890 visited
Japan, where he painted many street scenes.16
Frank Duveneck was one of the most
important American painters of his time and
was also remarkable as a teacher of wideranging
influence. He was born in
Covington, Kentucky, just across the Ohio
River from Cincinnati. His name was originally
Frank Decker and he acquired the
name Duveneck from his stepfather. Both
his father, Bernard Decker, and his mother
(nee Katherine Seimers) came from a small
town near Vechta in Oldenburg. As a young
—51—
Cincinnati Artists________________
man in Cincinnati, Duveneck worked as an
assistant to the church decorator William
Lamprecht, discussed above. Duveneck was
also a friend of the Cincinnati painter
Rudolf Tschudi, whose portrait he painted.
During a long stay in Munich, Duveneck
was influenced by the realism of such
painters as Wilhelm Leibl and Wilhelm von
Dietz.17
John Henry Twachtmann, who was
born in Cincinnati, was the son of immigrant
parents from Hannover. He studied
under Duveneck in Cincinnati after Duveneck's
return from Munich, but soon put
aside Munich realism in favor of an impressionist
and tonalist style.18
There were numerous other artists who
were born into German families in
Cincinnati. William Jacob Baer (1860-
1941) began as a lithographer but turned to
painting after study in Munich. He is known
particularly for his miniatures, portraits, and
genre scenes. Edward G. Eisenlohr (1872-
1961) studied at the academy in Karlsruhe
and eventually settled in Texas, where he
painted western subjects. John Rettig (1860-
1932) was a pupil of the Cincinnati Art
School whose entire life was spent in
Cincinnati. The sculptor Charles Henry
Niehaus (1855-1935) came from a German
immigrant family and went to study in
Munich after studying at the McMicken
— Peter C. Merrill
Florida Atlantic University
—52—
1
Arthur R. Schultz, German-American Relations and
German Culture in America: A Subject
Bibliography (Millwood, New York: Kraus
International Publications, 1984), Vol. 1, 506.
2
Ophia D. Smith, "Frederick Eckstein, the Father of
Cincinnati Art," Bulletin of the Historical and
Philosophical Society of Ohio, Vol. 9 (1951),
266-282.
3
Judith A. Barter and Lynn E. Springer, Currents of
Expansion: Painting in the Midwest 1820-
1940 (St. Louis: The St. Louis Art Museum,
1977), 71, 176.
4
William Coyle, The Frankenstein Family in
Springfield (Springfield, Ohio: Clark County
Historical Society, 1967).
5
For information on Koempel and Lamprecht, see
William H. Gerdts, Art Across America: Two
Centuries of Regional Painting (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1990), Vol. 2, 185. For information
on Gerhardt Mueller, see George C.
Groce and David H. Wallace, The New York
Historical Society's Dictionary of Artists in
America, 1564-1850 (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 1957), 459.
6
Groce and Wallace, 565.
7
Groce and Wallace, 383-384.
8
Karl Brun, Schweizerisches Kunstler-Lexikon
(Frauenfeld: Huber, 1905-1917), Vol. 3, 341.
9
Barter and Springer, 107.
10
Edna Marie Clark, Ohio An and Artists
(Richmond: Garrett and Massie, 1932), 443.
11
Benjamin F. Klein, Lithography in Cincinnati, 2
vols. (Cincinnati: Young and Klein, 1858-
1959).
l2
For information on Klauprecht, see Robert Ward, A
Bio-Bibliography of German-American
Writers (White Plains, New York: Kraus
International Publications, 1985), 155. For
Menzel, see Groce and Wallace, 438.
13
Martin W. Wiesendanger, "Lithographic Lives,"
American-German Review, Vol. 9 (June 1943),
7-10.
14
Groce and Wallace, 311.
15
Groce and Wallace, 218.
16
Bruce Weber, "Robert Frederick Blum (1857-
1903) and his Milieu." 2 vols. (Dissertation,
City University of New York, 1985).
l7
Allen Johnson and Duman Malone (eds.),
Dictionary of American Biography (New York:
Charles Scribner's 1957), Vol. 3, 558-561.
18
Wanda M. Corn, The Color of Mood: American
Tonalism 1900-1910 (San Francisco: M. H.
DeYoung Memorial Museum, 1972).
19
Biographical information on many of these artist
can be found in Peter Hastings Falk (ed.), Who
Was Who in American Art (Madison,
Connecticut: Sound View Press, 1985) and in
Mantle Fielding, Mantle Fielding's Dictionary
of American Painters, Sculptors, and
Engravers. Second revised edition, Glen B.
Opitz, ed. (Poughkeepsie, NY: Apollo Book,
1986).
20
On the passing of the German cultural scene in
Cincinnati, see particularly Guido A. Dobbert,
"The Cincinnati Germans, 1870-1920:
Disintegration of an Immigrant Community,"
Bulletin of the Cincinnati Historical Society,
Vol. 23 (1965), 224-242. On the vitality of
Cincinnati's artistic legacy, see Cincinnati Art
Galleries, Panorama of Cincinnati Art 1850-
1950 (Cincinnati: Cincinnati Art Galleries,
1986). Arthur R. Schultz, German-American
Relations and German Culture in America: A
Subject Bibliography (Millwood, New York:
Kraus International Publications, 1984), Vol. 1,
506.
NOTES
 |