Lot 221 Dα

Eduard Gaertner depicted the famous St. Catherine's Church in Brandenburg with its unmistakable Corpus Christi chapel in three paintings. The present work was the first example, painted in 1868, he produced a second version in 1870 which is now housed in the Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle, and a third dated 1872, now kept in the Berlin Stadtmuseum, which is one of his last identified works. The story of these paintings' genesis, especially that of this first example, is closely tied to the Berlin veduta painter's long standing friendship with ceramics manufacturer Ernst March from Charlottenburg. Following his death, his sons Paul and Emil continued to run the family business with considerable success. As a visible sign of this expansion, they commissioned an imposing villa on the grounds of the manufactory in 1866/67, and this arch shaped canvas formed a part of its décor.
The March heirs had an obvious interest in the Church of St. Catherine, an important example of north German Brick Gothic architecture, as when the church underwent extensive renovation between 1864 and 1865, large numbers of bricks and cast terracotta statues were required for it. It was not only a lucrative but an artistically challenging commission for the company (for more on this, see: A. Cante und G. Kopping: Die Katharinenkirche in Brandenburg an der Havel, Potsdam 1996).
This painting was last documented in the Villa March in the 1922 dissertation of W. Schmidt (op. cit., see also: A. Wolf: Studien zur Tonwarenfabrik March, Berlin 1990). After this all traces of the painting were lost for a time, as it was not sent to the Märkisches Museum like many other items from the Villa March, but remained in private ownership until today. Astoundingly, despite existing illustrations and descriptions, Irmgard Wirth did not include it in her monograph on Eduard Gaertner (I. Wirth: Eduard Gaertner. Der Berliner Architekturmaler, 1979).
All three versions of the motif display a similar composition. They show a diagonal view of the north face of the church and its choir with the delicate structure of the Corpus Christi Chapel built in 1430 before it. The left side of the image opens up onto a view of the charming town with the tower of the city hall in the background. Even the figures and trees which surround the composition vary only slightly between versions.