One century ago today, 7 November 1924, the German painter Hans Thoma died in Karlsruhe, Germany. This is the second of two articles commemorating his life and art. Prior to 1886, he had struggled to get the critical attention and patronage that he thought his work deserved.

Apollo and Marsyas (1886) is his painting of the grisly myth of the contest between the god Apollo and the satyr Marsyas, playing the aulos, a type of double oboe commonly referred to as a flute. This was judged by the nine Muses, and resulted in the horrific flaying of the satyr, a popular motif for the great classical narrative painters. Thoma chooses to show the contest itself, with Marsyas playing, and only three of the Muses in the background. Although not a strongly narrative painting, as it makes no reference to the outcome, this was probably appreciated by contemporary viewers.

Eight Dancing Women with Bird Bodies (1886) is a more puzzling mythological painting. The best-known women with bird bodies were the sirens, who range in number from two to five. In another painting showing the sirens trying to lure a passing ship, Thoma paints similar figures, suggesting these are intended to be sirens.

The Sower in Thoma’s 1886 painting is strongly reminiscent of Jean-François Millet’s sowers, here at work in the ploughed field in the foreground. Beyond, the heavens have opened in a sudden downpour.

Memories of Orte from 1887 refers to Thoma’s second visit to Italy, and this ancient town about forty miles north of Rome. Two cloaked riders are silhouetted against the glowing buildings of Orte, perched on its tuff butte above the valley of the River Tiber.

Lonely Ride (1889) shows a mediaeval knight riding alone in full armour, through rolling, hilly countryside. This and others of his paintings suggest Thoma may have seen and been influenced by paintings of the Pre-Raphaelite movement when he visited Britain.

In 1890, Thoma’s career was transformed by his first one-man show in Munich, which brought him critical acclaim and national recognition. For the next twenty years or so, he was ranked among the leading artists in Germany.

Summer (Landscape near Karlsruhe) (1891) shows a fine summer’s afternoon on a country track, on the plain which he must have known well.

He returned to his idiosyncratic mythology with this fascinating painting of Wondrous Birds completed in 1892. The birds shown here aren’t storks or cranes, but are based on the grey heron, a common sight across much of the countryside of Europe. There are various myths and legends associated with storks and cranes, but I’m not aware of any for the heron.

Spring (1895) refers not to the season, but to the source of water shown here, in German, Die Quelle, the source). Thoma avoids the conventional classical treatment with an old river god, but shows a young man slaking his thirst. The woman with the lute could perhaps be a water nymph, or Naiad.

Thoma does refer to the season in his Spring Fairytale, An Allegory (1898), showing a woman who may have been influenced by the figure of Flora in Botticelli’s famous Primavera (c 1482). She is surrounded by meadow flowers, two small fawns, and sundry winged putti. Thoma seldom if ever depicted his putti with bird-like wings, but seems to have preferred the more unusual insect or butterfly wings, with their rich colours.

By 1899, Thoma had become associated with the Kronberg artists’ colony, and could afford to move his family into an apartment with its own studio near to the Schloss Friedrichshof in Kronberg im Taunus, outside Frankfurt. He was appointed professor at the academy in Karlsruhe (to the south of Frankfurt), and director of the Kunsthalle in that city, posts he held until he retired in 1920.

Thoma’s Self-portrait in Front of a Birch Grove (1899) is his best-known self-portrait, and probably marked his sixtieth birthday that year.

The Lauterbrunnen Valley (1904) shows one of the deepest valleys in the Swiss Alps, a gorge travelling five miles up to the spectacular Staubbach Falls, with the Eiger and other peaks beyond.

From 1905 to 1918, Thoma served in the upper chamber of the Baden State Parliament.

Prior to the First World War, like many German artists of the day including Lovis Corinth, Thoma was strongly supportive of the militarisation of Germany. His painting of War from 1907 thus seems strange, with its bleak apocalyptic vision.

In the year that war broke out, Thoma painted Spring Melody (1914), which could be interpreted as an idealistic longing for peace, rather than a statement of nationalism.

Thoma continued to paint through the war, and completed this Landscape in 1917. Then in his late seventies, this almost deserted view expresses a tranquillity that must have been wishful thinking at the time.

His eightieth birthday in 1919 was marked by a celebration organised by Ernst Oppler and Lovis Corinth. He died five years later, in 1924.

Reference

Wikipedia (in German).

Little known today outside his native Germany, Hans Thoma (1839–1924) was a prolific painter with a distinctive style, who died a century ago, on 7 November 1924. In this article, I look at his career and a small selection of his paintings up to the time that he achieved recognition around 1885, to be concluded next week marking the anniversary of his death.

Thoma was born in the Black Forest, in Germany, and started his training as a lithographer in Basel, before turning to painting ornamental clock faces. From 1859, he studied at the academy in Karlsruhe, under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer and Ludwig Des Coudres.

Autumn Tree, Wiesenthal was painted when he was still a student in Karlsruhe, in about 1862-63. It has the high chroma colours and gestural brushwork indicative of Impressionist style, at a time when Claude Monet was still painting in a tighter, realist manner.

After completing his training in 1866, Thoma moved from Karlsruhe to Basel in north-west Switzerland, then to Düsseldorf. At that time, Düsseldorf was home to one of the leading landscape painting schools in Europe, and was a significant influence on the Hudson River School in the USA, and several of its members trained there.

In Chickenfeed (1867), Thoma tackles this genre scene in a more traditional and detailed realist style.

At first sight, Thoma’s In the Sunshine (1867) appears to show an oddly flattened face, with both the woman’s eyes visible. In fact the woman’s head is shown in profile, and what seems to be her left eye is not part of her face at all. Otherwise he has combined colour contrasts with a carefully detailed landscape.

The following year he moved to Paris, where he came to admire the work of Gustave Courbet, and the Barbizon School. He returned to Germany in 1870, where he settled in Munich, then the centre of German arts, until 1876.

Under the Elderberry (1871) is a delightful portrait of a mother and her young child, with finely detailed hair and elder flowers. His colours are softer than before, as suits this subject.

These eight Children Dancing in a Ring (1872) are set in a Bavarian alpine meadow, with pastures and high mountains in the far distance.

Thoma’s painting of two lovers in Summer from 1872 returns to a more painterly style in its flowers and vegetation. It also demonstrates his inclination towards mediaeval romance and ‘faerie’ paintings, with the chain of three winged putti in the upper right.

Siblings (1873) is an example of his domestic genre scenes. The brother sits disconsolate at the table, while his sister reads intently. By the window is a spinning wheel, the wool above it adorned with a blue ribbon.

In 1874, Thoma visited Italy for the first time.

Ring dancing appears again in his Children and Putti in a Ring (1874), although now the winged putti have come down from the sky to follow a young faun-like figure and a nymph. At the bottom left is a snake threatening to disrupt the scene. As with his other mythical settings, Thoma doesn’t appear to be telling a specific story, but populates his enchanted landscape with curious creatures.

Thoma’s pure landscapes include explorations of big skies and the transient effects of light, as in his Mainebene (1875), showing the plain of the River Main lit by shafts of light. At the lower left is a team ploughing.

He handles backlighting skilfully in A Peaceful Sunday (1876). An elderly couple are sat at a plain wooden table, in their urban apartment. She works at her crochet, he reads. You can almost hear the soft, measured tick of the clock which is out of sight, slowly passing their remaining years.

Three Mermaids (1879) is a complete contrast, with its raucous nudity and frolics with fish under the light of the moon. Thoma’s mermaids are remarkably human in form, lacking fishtails.

In 1878, Thoma moved to Frankfurt, where he was a close friend of the painter Wilhelm Steinhausen. The following year he visited Britain, and a year later returned to Italy.

As was popular during the nineteenth century, Thoma repurposed Nordic mythology with a more Germanic interpretation. The Trek of the Gods to Valhalla (1880) shows a scene that may have been inspired by Wagner’s Ring cycle, first performed at Bayreuth in 1876. This is the group of gods known as the Æsir riding across the bridge Bifröst, which is formed from a burning rainbow and reaches between Midgard (the realm of humans) and Asgard (the realm of the gods). The Æsir traditionally include Odin, Frigg, Thor, Baldr, and Týr. Recognisable on the bridge are Odin, holding his staff, with Frigg, and Thor with his hammer. At the left is probably Iðunn, holding an apple of her youth aloft. In Nordic mythology, this is an event foretold as part of the process of Ragnarök.

I’m not sure of the mythical background to his Sea Wonders (1881), where four boys have raised up a surface on which stands a winged putto clutching an egg. It is, nevertheless, a powerful image.

The Öd, View of Holzhausenpark in Frankfurt am Main (1883) shows what is perhaps better-known as Adolph-von-Holzhausen Park, which started as the larger Holzhausen Oed in around 1552, and became a public park in 1912-13. The prominent white building is its distinctive moated baroque summer residence.

Reference

Wikipedia (in German).

Mermaids and mermen are mythical creatures with origins outside the classical Mediterranean civilisations. Conventionally, their upper body is human, while below the waist they have the form of a fish. Mermaids seem invariably young, beautiful and buxom, and are most frequently encountered by fishermen and those who go down to the sea. In the Middle Ages they became confounded with the sirens of Greek and Roman myth, who were part human and part bird.

John William Waterhouse’s diploma study for the Royal Academy, painted in 1900, shows a conventional image of A Mermaid, seen combing her long tresses on the shore.

Despite their separate origin, mermaids have been depicted in accounts of some classical myths, perpetuating medieval confusion.

Gustave Moreau’s Venus Rising from the Sea from 1866 shows the goddess as she has just been born from the sea, and sits on a coastal rock, her arms outstretched in an almost messianic pose. On the left, a mermaid attendant holds up half an oyster shell with a single large pearl glinting in it. On the right, a merman proffers her a tree of bright pink coral, and cradles a large conch shell.

Ary Renan’s Charybdis and Scylla (1894) is an imaginative painting of one of the dangers to mariners in the Strait of Messina, between Sicily and the Italian mainland. Scylla was said to be a six-headed sea monster, but was actually a rock shoal, and Charybdis was a whirlpool. Renan shows both together, the whirlpool with its mountainous standing waves at the left, and the rocks at the right, with the form of a beautiful mermaid embedded in them.

As the First World War was ending, Franz von Stuck returned to his favourite faun motif in A Faun and a Mermaid (1918). This has survived in two almost identical versions, the other now being in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin. His version of a mermaid is a maritime equivalent of a faun, with separate scaly legs rather than the more conventional single fish tail. She grasps the faun’s horns and laughs with joy as the faun gives her a piggy-back out of the sea.

Perhaps the earliest painting of a mermaid in European art is in a Christian religious painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder, from 1518-20.

Cranach’s Saint Christopher shows the saint with his back and legs flexed as he bears the infant Christ on his left shoulder. In the foreground is an unusual putto-mermaid with a long coiled fish tail.

Mermaids feature in folktales from many of the traditions of Europe, where they’re known by local names such as havfrue in Denmark.

John Reinhard Weguelin’s watercolour of The Mermaid of Zennor (1900) tells the legend of a mermaid living in a cove near Zennor in Cornwall. This scene brings her together with Matthew Trewhella, a local chorister, whose voice she had fallen in love with. The legend tells that the couple went to live in the sea, and that his voice can still be heard in the cove.

Peter Nicolai Arbo’s Liden Gunver and the Merman (1874-1880) is drawn from an opera The Fishers, by Johannes Ewald and Johann Hartmann, first performed in Copenhagen in 1780. The young woman Liden Gunver, on the right, is taken to sea by the alluring but deceptive merman on the left.

Hans Thoma’s Three Mermaids (1879) lack fishtails as they frolic raucously with fish under the light of the moon.

Gustav Klimt’s Mermaids (Silverfish) (c 1899) appear to be tadpole-like creatures with smiling, womanly faces.

For countless generations, since humans first started farming the land, improving the soil and fields has been a constant task. Once the plough has passed, there’s still work to be done in many areas, where there are stones mixed in the soil. This has been the burden of those who have worked the land, and has been featured in occasional paintings.

Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s Worn Out (1889) follows in the Naturalist tradition of Jules Bastien-Lepage. An old man has collapsed when working in the fields. A younger woman, his daughter perhaps, is giving him aid and shouting for all she’s worth to summon assistance. The soil around them is poor, and full of flints; the two were engaged in the toil of the poorest of the poor, picking out the large stones and putting them into piles for collection. It’s backbreaking work for the young, and clearly proved too much for this man.

Once ploughed to a fine tilth and rid of its stones, the soil is ready for the seed of the next crop, accomplished by manual broadcasting, a term in common use long before it came to be applied to radio then TV transmissions.

Sowing is one of the basic tasks in arable farming, and one at the heart of the changes that took place between 1600 and 1900. Broadcasting is tedious, time-consuming and inefficient in use of seed, making it one of the first tasks for attempts to mechanise farming. Although early types of seed drill had been tried before, it’s Jethro Tull, an English gentleman farmer from the early eighteenth century, who has generally been credited with inventing the first successful seed drill, in 1701. Today his name is better-known as that of one of the great rock bands formed in 1967.

Alongside the use of a seed drill was the requirement for a horse hoe, a light and small plough drawn by a single horse, to ensure the seed was well covered by soil. Unfortunately, early drills proved too fragile for general use, and it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that metal could be turned to manufacture more durable drills, that became widespread across Western Europe during the rest of that century. However, contemporary painting continued to show sowers still broadcasting seed.

The first of these is Jean-François Millet’s The Sower, completed in 1850, shown at the Salon that year and now recognised as his first real masterpiece. It shows an agricultural worker striding across a field, broadcasting seed for the summer’s crop. In the distance to the right, and caught in the sunlight, is another worker harrowing with a pair of oxen. This was being used to ensure the seed sown was covered with soil, and not exposed to the flurry of birds trying to eat any seed left on the surface.

Millet revisited his successful painting of a sower from fifteen years earlier, here with two pastel paintings with the same title, The Sower, from around 1865. That above is now in the Walters, and that below in the Clark. These feature a different background, including the tower of Chailly, harrowing using a pair of horses, and a swirling flock of crows in the sky.

By the late nineteenth century, manual broadcasting was becoming less common as farms turned to seed drills, but the image of the sower continued to appear in paintings.

The title of Hans Thoma’s Säender Bauer (1886) apparently means Sowing Framer (thanks to Gregory for his accurate translation). A sower in Millet’s tradition is at work in the ploughed field in the foreground. Beyond, the heavens have opened in a sudden downpour. Two years later, when he was living in Arles in November 1888, Vincent van Gogh painted his version of The Sower.

Millet’s influence is also manifest in the first of Albin Egger-Lienz’s versions of The Sower, from 1903, a motif which was to recur in his later works. Its earth colours, increasing looseness, and emphasis on simplicity were to set the style for much of the rest of his career.

Laurits Andersen Ring admired Millet’s social realism, and would undoubtedly have seen at least one of Millet’s depictions of this motif. In 1910, Ring painted this, The Sower, in such great detail that you can see every seed frozen in mid-air. This suggests that he may have been influenced by photography, the first means of producing such images.

Ring’s friend and contemporary Hans Andersen Brendekilde responded in 1914 with A Sower on a Sunny Spring Day at Brendekilde Church. This is thought to show Holme-Olstrup Church, near Næstved on the island of Sjælland (Zealand), close to where Brendekilde was born and from where he had taken his name. The sower, walking over poor soil with abundant stones, has been identified as Ole Frederik Jensen (1870-1953).

This motif seems to have long outlasted the practice of broadcasting. By 1900, even gardeners and smallholders were being offered mechanical seed drills. As those used less than a third of the seed than broadcasting, it’s hard to see any farmer in the early twentieth century still preferring traditional methods.

With the young plants growing vigorously, all that remained for the growing season was to keep them free from weeds, another laborious and back-breaking task often assigned to women.

The Weeders (1868) is a smaller variant of a painting of the same name that Jules Breton made in 1860, which was acclaimed when exhibited in the Salon the following year and the Exposition Universelle in 1867. Set in the fields just outside Courrières, the labourers are pulling up thistles and other weeds until the last moment that there is insufficient light for them to work any longer. Breton wrote of their faces encircled by the pink transparency of their violet bonnets, as if worshipping the life-giving star.

Although only peasants, the light transforms these women into classical beauties, an observation made by the critics at the time. This gives rise to a phenomenon repeated across Breton’s panoramas of country work, in which these classical figures appear in thoroughly socially-realist landscapes, showing their sanctity in labour.

Jakub Schikaneder’s Weeder (1887) shows a woman bent double as she pulls weeds from a young crop, and would pass for a social realist work from the likes of Millet or Breton.