Lot 2296 Dα

In 1859, at the age of seventeen, Eugen Bracht drew the ruins of Dreieichenhain Castle near his home town of Darmstadt. The inked pencil drawing came from his estate to the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe ( inv. no. VIII 1150-20, fig. 1). The subject was close to the artist's heart: in 1870 the view served him as a model for a landscape-format painting as a gift for his later wife (cf. Manfred Großkinsky: Eugen Bracht, Darmstadt 1992, p. 80, fig. 49). At that time Bracht worked as a wool merchant in Berlin. After his first training in Karlsruhe from 1859 to 1861 with Johann Wilhelm Schirmer he had turned away from painting to earn his living as a merchant. Dissatisfied with this, he dissolved his Berlin business in 1875 and resumed his studies at the Karlsruhe art school. In 1877 he began a successful freelance career (first in Karlsruhe, from 1882 in Berlin); the present painting was created in the same year.
In dramatic vertical format, Dreieichenhain Castle once again becomes the central subject of the picture. The ruins of the tower are enthroned on a rocky base; the ascent leading diagonally into the picture from the right crosses the diagonal of the rocky hill and castle in the centre of the picture. The earth tones contrast with the abyss of the cool, misty lowlands behind. This is where the view leads through the enormous, centrally placed archway into the depths of the picture. Its dimensions are made clear by the addition of five guards in Baroque-style historical costumes.
In this picture, with which he started his successful career as an artist, Bracht effectively combines contemporary landscape painting based on nature studies with a compositionally sovereign pictorial dynamic on the basis of the biographically influenced romantic subject.


We would like to thank Dr Manfred Großkinsky and Dr Rudolf Theilmann (both Karlsruhe) for verbally confirming Eugen Bracht's autograph.