Friday, April 9, 2021

The young Goethe

Goethe by Lips

Yes, I have updated the image on the blog. Quite a lot of my scholarship has concerned Goethe's earliest literary productions, what I call the "pre-Weimar Goethe," as there occurred a slow transformation of  his poetic production after he settled in Weimar in 1775. He moved away from what initially made him Germany's most famous writer, the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther and Götz von Berlichingen. This was the Goethe about whom I wrote my dissertation, a study of the earliest influences on his writing. The last few years I was involved on the subject of world literature, which owes much to Goethe's own thoughts on that notion, beginning in the 1820s. For about a year now, I have been working on a project that takes me back to my earlier focus, and am rereading his earliest works again. In this connection, I am also rereading his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit, which deals with that early period of his life, published in 1811, The above drawing of Goethe by Johann Heinrich Lips was done about the time of the Rhine journey Goethe undertook in 1774.

Today I was reading a passage in Book 15 of the autobiography, in which Goethe describes that trip, which include a visit to the Jabach home in Cologne, named after the man who built the house in the 17th century. I posted a few years ago on Goethe's visit (see here), in which he spoke of the effect on him of a family portrait of the Jabach family. I had just seen the painting myself, which has been recently acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Today I looked up the work on the Met's website and learned that it had been sold already in 1792 to an English collector, after which it passed through various private hands before its acquisition by the Metropolitan in 2014. According to the commentary in the Hamburg edition of the autobiography, the Jabach house itself was destroyed by a bomb in 1943.

Gamepiece with Dead Heron (1695)

On this Rhine journey in which Goethe made lots of new acquaintances along the way, he also visited the hunting estate Bensberg Castle, which had a large collection of paintings of hunting scenes by the Netherlandic painter Jan Weenix. Goethe was very impressed by one of the paintings of dead game ("entlebten Geschöpfe") by Weenix. It's impossible to know which painting Goethe saw at Bensberg, but the image here shows one of Weenix's paintings that is also now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its provenance, however, is very different. According to the Met website, it was owned by Baron Mayer Rothschild of Vienna until 1905, when it passed to his nephew Alphonse. It was seized by the Nazis in 1932, then returned to Austria in 1948, and restituted to Clarice Baron Rothschild of New York in 1950. The dealers Rosenberg & Stiebel sold the painting to the Met in 1950.

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