February 2003 - Nr. 2
Tischbein Works on Paper Auctioned in New York
TWIG - Nearly 800 drawings, watercolors and gouaches by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1751-1829), a painter who worked closely with author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, were sold this week by the New York auction house Christie’s. The works, many of which brought almost double their estimated price, were part of a collection assembled during Tischbein’s lifetime and put up for auction by an anonymous seller in Europe, according to Christie’s. The most valuable work in the collection, an illustration for Goethe’s verse setting of a satirical tale, Reineke Fuchs, sold for US$113,525. Tischbein sales at the auction exceeded US$1 million.
Tischbein was a close friend of Goethe’s and toured Italy with him in the 1780s. It was in Rome that he began the portrait Goethe in der Campagna, which shows Germany’s most celebrated writer in a large hat, draped in white, against a backdrop of classical ruins. Tischbein and Goethe also collaborated extensively, and many of the works auctioned this week reflect their artistic bond. Among the most notable are a group of 24 watercolours that served as inspiration for Goethe’s verse cycle "Wilhelm Tischbein’s Idylls," eventually published in the literary journal Über Kunst und Alterthum (On Art and Antiquity). Also included in the sale were a number portraits of classical heroes intended for an illustrated edition of Homer.
