Reinhold Begas

Reinhold Begas Kaiser Wilhelm I on horseback, led by the Allegory of Victory Bronze, finely chased, golden brown patina. Round foundry mark Gladenbeck. H 40, W approx. 22, D approx. 32 cm. Berlin, Gladenbeck foundry, around 1900. This is one of the rare reductions of the central equestrian motif from the Kaiser Wilhelm National Monument. The sculptor Reinhold Begas and the architect Gustav Halmhuber erected the 21-meter-high monument between 1895 and 1897 on Berlin's Schlossfreiheit. Reinhold Begas was born in Schöneberg on July 15, 1831. As the son of the German painter Carl Joseph Begas, he was the scion of a dynasty of artists spanning several generations and therefore came into contact with the fine arts at an early age. Unlike his famous father, however, Reinhold Begas was more enthusiastic about sculpture from the outset, so that he received his basic training not in his father's workshop, but with the sculptor Ludwig Wilhelm Wichmann in Berlin. In 1846, he began his studies under Christian Daniel Rauch at the Berlin Academy of Art, which at the time had Johann Gottfried Schadow, one of the greatest sculptors in German art history, as its director. Reinhold Begas himself achieved his first success with his plaster group Hagar and Ishmael and was able to visit Rome on a scholarship from 1856 to 1858. In the cosmopolitan city, rich in tradition and art, he made the acquaintance of artistic personalities such as Arnold Böcklin, Heinrich Dreber and Anselm Feuerbach and created his marble group Amor and Psyche in the style of the Swiss sculptor Ferdinand Schlöth. Under the influence of his experiences in Rome, not least through his study of the works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Michelangelo, Reinhold Begas leaned towards a baroque style that ran counter to the strict classicism that still prevailed. In 1861, he received a call from the still young Grand Ducal Saxon School of Art in Weimar, where he met his Rome acquaintance Böcklin again as a teacher and also got to know Franz von Lenbach. Reinhold Begas held his teaching post until 1863 and then returned to Berlin. Although there were repeated short stays in Rome and Paris, Prussian Berlin remained the home of the artist, who earned the goodwill of the Hohenzollerns with his undisguised pathos and received numerous prestigious commissions from Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Kaiser Wilhelm National Monument, unveiled in 1897, was designed by Reinhold Begas together with Gustav Halmhuber in the neo-baroque style; it survived two world wars but was destroyed in the GDR in 1950; only three figures were preserved.