Heinrich Schwemminger (Vienna 1803-1884), Nibelungen Studies

Heinrich Schwemminger (Vienna 1803-1884)

Studies for Scenes from the Nibelungenlied

Various media and sizes

These drawings for scenes from the Nibelungenlied by the Viennese artist Heinrich Schwemminger represent one of his favorite subjects and a popular in the early and middle nineteenth century. They were included in an album compiled by the artist as a memento of his long career. All sheets are listed below with their present location. Those with Michael Miller Fine Arts inquire for prices.

Heinrich Schwemminger, born into a family of decorative artists, established a reputation as a painter of portraits and narrative scenes. He studied in Vienna at the Akademie der bildenden Künste and in Munich. In 1837 he went to Rome on a government stipend and remained there until 1842. After that he became a Kurator at the Vienna Academy and, in 1861, a professor. While he never became as famous as his collegue Josef Führich, his artistic development followed similar lines. The early work of both artists showed the influence of their Nazarene models, Overbeck, Koch, Cornelius, and Scheffer von Leonardshoff. Führich retained his allegiance to the style of the early nineteenth century, but Schwemminger’s optical propensities led him more towards realism. In this way he became a typical and outstanding proponent of the Biedermeier style in Vienna.

A friend of Moritz von Schwind and a relation by marriage of Franz Schubert, Schwemminger was a fixture in the artistic world of mid-century Vienna. His drawings in the album represent the typical Nazarene and Biedermeier thematic material which occupied him: illustrations of German legend (The Nibelungenlied: fol. 11v, 12r, 27v B) and poetry [Schiller’s Die Kraniche des Ibykus (fol. 14v, 15v, 18), and Uhland’s Des Sänger’s Fluch (23r A&B). The numerous drawings from his stay in Rome show many of the principle preoccupations of the resident German artists: studies of Italian peasants and their costumes, copies of masterworks of the Italian Renaissance, academic studies of models in poses inspired by Renaissance models, etc.

Boetticher lists four groups of Nibelungen illustrations, all presumably oils, which were either exhibited at the Vienna Academy or sold directly to the private collectors mentioned. Two in the first group are dated 1844 and 1847, but B. mentions no dates for the others. While the style of the study for Kriemhild's Dream (sold) resembles Schwemminger's late Nazarene style of the 1830's, the others correspond to the more plastic approach he developed after his return from Rome and are compatible with a dating to the mid-forties. Schwemminger, of course, was not alone in following the influential examples of Peter Cornelius and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. In 1812-13 Cornelius, attempting to recapture an essential German character in art, which he feared had been lost in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, made a series of six drawings of scenes from the Nibelungenlied (Städel, Frankfurt), which reached a wide audience through prints published in Berlin in 1817 and completed by other artists in 1821. Schnorr, beginning in 1827 and continuing on until 1867, painted mural decorations in the Königsbau of the Residenz in Munich, initially for King Ludwig I. This large-scale project cast a broad shadow in the southern German world, and Schnorr's stylistic influence also appears in Schwemminger's drawing of the Expulsion from Paradise, which was also in our album. Another event is symptomatic of just how much the Nibelungenlied was in the air: Richard Wagner began his prose draft of Ring: der Nibelungen-Mythos in the autumn of 1848.

Bibliography: Ursula Mayr-Harting, "Three Drawings by Heinrich Schwemminger (1803-1884), "The Ashmolean, 31, Christmas 1996, pp. 13ff.

Friedrich von Boetticher, Malerwerke Des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Beitrag Zur Kunstgeschichte, Dresden: F. v. Boetticher, 1891.

Several of these drawings are now in major museum collections in Great Britain and the United States, among the the Ashmolean Museum, the British Museum, the Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Cummer Museum in Jacksonville, Florida.