Franz Ludwig Catel

Bio

The son of French Calvinists from Sedan, Franz Ludwig Catel was born in Berlin, where his father owned a shop selling games and carved wooden items. The painter and engraver Daniel Chodowiecki, who gave him and his brother Ludwig Friedrich their initial training, recognized his early talent. Franz Ludwig entered the Berlin Academy in 1797 but left the following year left for Paris, to complete his artistic education, enrolling in the École des Beaux-Arts. His first commission was from the eminent German poet Goethe, who asked him to illustrate his work, Hermann und Dorothea, published in 1799. Returning to Berlin in 1800 he married Sophie Friedrike Kolbe, the daughter of an artist; she died in 1810 and four years later he remarried the famously beautiful Margherita Prunelli, daughter of the writer Michelangelo Prunelli. Over the next several years he concentrated first on his watercolor technique, and in 1805-06 he joined the older painter and architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel in making a series of watercolors to illustrate the Verzierungen aus dem Altertum. Catel returned to Paris in 1807, where he encountered the young brothers Heinrich and Ferdinand Olivier, whom he followed to Rome in 1811. He remained in Italy for most of the remainder of his life, journeying to Pompeii with the French archeologist A. L. Millin (illustrating his Descriptions des tombeaux qui ont été decouverts à Pompeii dans l’année 1812) and traveling through Sicily in 1818 with the Russian Prince and Princess Galitzine. He was friendly with the leading Nazarenes and even joined them in the Casa Bartholdi in the years 1816-1818, painting two of the overdoors. Catel was more attracted to genre and landscape painting than they, however, and was influenced in the latter by the work of Josef Anton Koch and the Norwegian painter Johann Christian Dahl, whom he met in 1820-21. He was an amusing companion as well as a talented artist and much favored by German noblemen visiting Rome; there he met the future King Ludwig I of Bavaria, whom he painted surrounded by his friends (who included Thorvaldsen, Schnorr and Catel himself) in Crown Prince Ludwig in the Spanish Wine Cellar of Don Raffaele at the Ripa Grande (1824, Munich, Bayerische Staatsgemaldesammlungen). He also befriended the Italophile Duke Friedrich IV of Saxe-Coburg-Altenburg (painted in a Roman setting in 1815 by Vogel von Vogelstein, see fig. ), whom he painted in a view through to his Roman garden in 1818. One of this artist’s most poetic works shows Schinkel reading at the open window with a view of part of the bay of Naples in the distance (Berlin, National Gallery). These three paintings all share a common characteristic, having the principle figures shown in an interior, with a compelling and detailed landscape view through the door or window.

Catel also traveled to Greece with the Hellenophile Bavarian Crown Prince, whose brother was later to be elected the first Greek King, and once again painted his royal friend, but in a more ennobling setting than a Roman bar. Catel made many other royal and aristocratic connections, including that of Prince Heinrich of Prussia who, in 1824, commissioned a Resurrection for the Evangelical Luisenkirche in Charlottenburg (Berlin). The artist rejected an invitation to become professor of drawing at the Berlin Academy in 1826, preferring to stay in Italy, but accepted his nomination to membership of the Antwerp Academy. By the 1840s Catel began to paint more ambitious Italian rustic genre subjects, which, while conforming to the sentimental taste of his contemporaries, are usually less interesting than his earlier work. At the time of his second marriage he converted to Roman Catholicism and seems to have become increasingly devout with age. He established the Pio Istituto Catel and, as he died childless, bequeathed everything he owned to this institute (the proceeds of their sale totaled 80,000 scudi).