German Grain Fields and Academy Artists
After completing my recent trek along California’s El Camino Real and previous Mid-Atlantic exploration of Colonial heritage grains and agrarian art (see blog series here), I turned my attention to Europe as opportunity had arisen through Journey Tours of Wenatchee, Washington, to lead a group on a ten-day Baltic cruise preceded by several days in Germany. A special benefit was that my wife, Lois, was able to join me and also enjoy the fellowship of several longtime friends who accompanied us on the tour that commenced in Frankfurt, a. M. where our group convened for a remarkable summertime adventure. One of our first destinations was the Hessenpark Open Air Museum north of the Frankfurt about twenty-five miles and where over 100 historic buildings, many of them timber-frame structures dating from the 1700s, had been relocated and restored since 1974 in a substantial park covering 160 acres. Hessenpark is divided into several village sections representing the surrounding state’s several regions, and contains several small farmsteads where heritage grains and fruits are raised. We found Kaiser Wilhelm and King of Pippin apples but I was most interested in the park’s maturing stands of ancient emmer, einkorn, and spelt, grains that are the prehistoric precursors of all heritage grains.
Hessenpark Heritage Grain Plots (left to right): Einkorn, Spelt, Emmer
The entrance to Hessenpark features a substantial art gallery that showcases paintings, etchings, and other works that depict agrarian experience in central Germany. We learned that Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Munich, and other major German cities hosted art academies that became widely known for interpretations of nature and rural life through new approaches to subject, color, and composition. Peter von Cornelius (1784-1867) and Wilhelm von Schadow (1789-1862) served successively as influential directors of the Düsseldorf Academy spanning the decades from 1819 to 1859 when Kunstakademie artists painted finely detailed and often fanciful, allegorical landscapes that significantly influenced many prominent American Hudson River painters including George Caleb Bingham and William Morris Hunt. Cornelius and van Schadow were among the earliest members of Lukasbund (Brothers of Luke), derisively called The Nazarenes for their close-cropped hair and pious lifestyle, who had banded together in Rome as young men in order to grow spiritually and rediscover the nearly lost techniques used by Renaissance Italian masters for monumental fresco painting. The Nazarenes chose to paint Old and New Testament religious scenes with timeless messages and selected the story of Joseph from the Book of Genesis for their first major commission which was installed as five sections in 1817 for the banqueting hall of Rome’s Palazzo Zuccari (present Bibliotheca Hertziana), residence of the Prussian Consul-General Jacob Bartholdy. Cornelius’s Joseph Interprets Pharaoh’s Dream features a shield of grain stalks to represent the young prophet’s explanation of the coming seasons of abundant harvests following by the lean years, and The Seven Years of Plenty by Philipp Veit (1793-1877) shows a seated maiden and children surrounded by fruit and golden sheaves of grain. Known later as the Casa Bartholdy Frescoes, the paintings and their creators became famous and in the 1880s were transferred to Berlin’s National Gallery.
Casa Bartholdy Frescoes, Philipp Veit, The Seven Years of Plenty (1817), Peter von Cornelius, Joseph Interprets Pharoah’s Dream (1817), Old National Gallery, Berlin
One of Germany’s most prolific painters of harvest and other agrarian scenes, Hugo Mühlig (1854-1929), was born in Dresden to a family of prominent landscapists. He became a seasonal participant in the country’s oldest art colony, the Willingshäusen Malerkolonie, which had been established in the picturesque Hessian village north of Frankfurt, a. M. surrounded by rolling hills and valleys bathed in a liquid light that had long attracted artists to the area. Colony founder and Baltic German Gerhardt Wilhelm von Reutern (1794-1865) had come to Willingshäusen to recover from serious injuries suffered when a commander in the Russian army at the 1814 Battle of Leipzig. The Romanov family provided von Reutern a stipend and with encouragement from Goethe and Emil Lugwig Grimm, the third of the brothers Grimm, he decided to convalesce in the area and paint local inhabitants and scenery.
Landscape painter and book illustrator Hans Richard von Volkmann, a native of Halle who trained at the Düsseldorf Academy, also frequented Willingshausen. Some of von Volkman’s work anticipates Art Nouveau, and he rendered many harvest scenes in masterful sepia etchings including Field Road (1907), Harvest Time, Willingshausen (1909), and Cloudy Day (1910). Düsseldorf native Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth (1855-1928) became an influential professor of portraiture and landscape art at Weimar and Stuttgart where he painted many peasant farming scenes including The Gleaners (1888), Reapers in Bergsulza (1888), and Harvest Time (1900). Von Kalckreuth’s views are notable for the melancholy depiction of female field laborers who seem to shoulder their burdens with stoic indifference. Summer captures an expectant mother clad in blue with a white headscarf striding forth deep in thought alongside a patch of ripened grain.
Leopold Graf von Kalckreuth, Summer (1890), Oil on canvas, 140 ⅙ x 115 ¾ inches, Royal Danish Museum, Copenhagen
The Tsar’s Village and Imperial Farm at St. Petersburg
The next destination on this summertime Baltic cruise was St. Petersburg, Tsar Peter the Great’s spectacular “Window on the West” to which he moved the imperial capital in the early 1700s and which remained the seat of the Russian government until the early 20th century. After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution its name was changed to Leningrad and distant Moscow became Russia’s capital again. Since the 1990s St. Petersburg’s original name has been restored and considerable development has returned much of the city to its original splendor after considerable damage during the Second World War and economic stagnation under Communist rule. Mr. Putin is not nearly as interested in the ways of the West as was Peter the Great, but we were treated warmly by our Russia hosts and treated to unforgettable tours of Peterhof Palace west of the city, and to Catherine the Great’s legendary Winter Palace and Hermitage.
Peterhof Palace near St. Petersburg, Russia
Catherine was a contemporary of George Washington, and has gone down in history as sympathetic to the American cause for not supporting British King George’s request to send troops to help defeat the Colonists. And while Peter the Great was greatly interested in modernizing the military and building new cities, Catherine had special interest in improving Russian agriculture. In the 1760s she issued a special manifesto inviting foreigners to settle on the vast steppes of southern Russia and supply the country and continent with grain. In this way my ancestors immigrated to Russia in the 1760s and settled in the Volga River region near Saratov where they introduced productive grains like Saxonka soft red wheat. A century afterward, in the 1870s, some of their descendants began relocating to the United States to become farmers in the Mid-Atlantic states, Midwest, and beyond. By 1920, over 100,000 of these “German-Russians” were living in the Pacific Northwest. In the process, hard red bread wheats native to south Russia and Ukraine like Red Fife and Turkey Red made their way to North America in the 1800s and became the first true bread wheats ever raised in the United States and Canada.
Palouse Heritage Turkey Red Wheat
Palouse Heritage Red Fife Wheat
Among many other accomplishments during her long reign, the Empress Catherine the Great composed children’s stories like Tsarevitch Chlor, a morality tale set in the Russian countryside where the young man must find the right path for his own wellbeing and that of others through pursuit of virtue and application of reason. “…[T]hey saw a peasant’s hut and some acres of very fertile land in which there was every cereal: rye, oats, barley, buckwheat and others. Further, they saw pastures on which sheep, cows, and horses were grazing.” Catherine further commissioned a breathtaking project to transform a vast area near the summer palace at Tsarskoe Selo, the “Tsar’s Village” west of St. Petersburg, into an allegorical landscape shaped by her conception of this Russian ideal. Catherine found in Orthodox priest and agronomist Andrei Samborsky (1732-1815) a teacher with the proper background to tutor her grandsons and a small circle of privileged classmates like Prince Alexander Golitsyn. After graduating from the Kiev Academy in 1765, Samborsky had studied agriculture in England and served as chaplain at the Russian Embassy in London, married an Englishwoman, and returned to Russia to begin tutoring the Russian dukes in religion and natural science in 1782.
K. K. Schultz, Imperial Farm Cottage, c. 1835 (Tsarskoe Selo west of St. Petersburg), Views of St. Petersburg and Moscow (1847)
With the Empress’s support, Samborsky formulated plans for an Imperial Farm and School of Practical Agriculture on a thousand acres adjacent to Tsarskoe Selo (Tsar’s Village) which became an important state institution devoted to the improvement of crop and livestock production and farm management. An engraving from the time shows Samborsky plowing with an improved English implement as his distinguished Order of St. Vladimir medal hangs from a nearby tree. Open land in the vicinity was sown to wheat, rye, pasture grass, and other crops while workers labored nearby in the 1780s atPavlovsk, the splendid summer palace of Catherine’s son, Paul I, and from 1792 to 1796 on his son’s Neoclassical residence, the Alexander Palace. The first structure built at Pavlovsk was the open air Temple to Ceres (later Catherine’s Concert Hall, 1780) by the empress’s favored architect Charles Cameron (1745-1812), a colonnaded Doric rotunda that originally contained a statue of Catherine as Ceres and the painted panel An Offering to Ceres. Images of Ceres and a variety of grain and other botanical designs also adorn the magnificent Raphael Loggias commissioned in the 1780s by Catherine for the walls of a new wing the Hermitage. Austrian artist Christoph Unterberger (1732-1798) led the ambitious project of replicating Raphael’s sixteenth century originals for the Vatican Palace, where they have since been lost. Unterberger and his team worked from 1783 to 1792 to complete the meticulous and vivid designs for Catherine’s great hall using egg tempura on canvas.
Christoph Unterberger, Raphael Loggias and Grain Motif Panels (c. 1783), Winter Palace and Hermitage, St. Petersburg
The Imperial Farm as originally constructed from 1828 to 1830 under Tsar Nicholas I (1796-1855) featured buildings of Tudor Gothic country style designed by Scottish architect Adam Menelaws (c. 1750-1831) with a Farm Cottage built nearby as an izba containing rooms for visiting members of the imperial family. Outbuildings included a stone barn, stables, granary, and dairy, and a kitchen redesigned in 1841 to serve as a Grand Ducal School. The Cottage was expanded to three floors in the late 1850s with the addition of bedrooms, and dining and drawing rooms. An imposing two-story ocher-colored Farm Palace and surrounding gardens were then built nearby in English country style which Alexander II used as his favored summer residence for the rest his life. When time permitted, Alexander especially enjoyed his Blue Study which displayed favored paintings and fine bindings. Produce from the farm was used to provision residents and workers at Tsarskoe Selo estates.
With support from his influential minister and spiritual advisor Alexander Golitsyn (1773-1844), Alexander I approved creation in 1819 of the Moscow Agricultural Society which began operation three years later. The important precedent for such a voluntary association with agricultural interests had been the Free Economic Society established by Catherine in 1765, though the Moscow association was solely devoted to promotion of progress in the empire’s farming sector by influential landowners and scientists through “a harmonious fusion of west European improvements and native traditions. Through study and dissemination of rational techniques to improve production, prevent regional crop failures, and advance agricultural education, the society represented an important step in translating Enlightenment thought into practical action. Alexander II held numerous meetings at the Farm Palace on land reform and appropriately composed the Emancipation Edict of 1861 abolishing serfdom in the while residing there.
This blog post is continued in Part 2, available here.