4390 - August von Brandis, At the Couven Museum in Aachen

August von Brandis, At the Couven Museum in Aachen A glimpse into the stately Baroque ambience of Aachen’s Couven Museum: the art historian Felix Kuetgens (Director of Aachen’s Municipal Museums since 1923) established a museum of 18th- and 19th-century domestic culture in the Haus Fey, which was originally built in 1681 and later converted into a Baroque style by the architects Johann Joseph Couven and Jakob Couven, which was acquired by the city in 1925, from 1929 onwards, August von Brandis produced paintings of the exquisite interiors of Haus Fey, which was destroyed in 1943 along with the majority of its furnishings; the painting thus constitutes a valuable historical record of a room that no longer exists, characterised by a lightly impastoed style and restrained colouring, oil on canvas and stretcher frame, signed ‘A. v. Brandis’ lower right, with an old artist’s label on the reverse of the stretcher frame reading ‘28. A. v. Brandis Aachen, Carlstr. 24 - Couven Museum, Upper Garden Room - ceiling, cupboard, 2 chairs’, slight signs of ageing, unframed, dimensions approx. 67.5 x 51 cm. Artist information: born August Friedrich Carl von Brandis, German painter and draughtsman (1862, Berlin-Haselhorst - 1947, Aachen); studied at the Berlin Academy from 1881 to 1884 under Hugo Vogel and Anton von Werner; worked as an art teacher from 1884 onwards; from 1904 Professor of Figure and Landscape Painting at the Technical University of Danzig; he was a friend of Ludwig Dill and Adolf Hölzel and collaborated with Hölzel’s painting school “Neu-Dachau” and the Dachau artists’ colony, 1909-29: Professor at the Faculty of Architecture at RWTH Aachen, 1925-26: Dean of RWTH Aachen; received various honours, including the Gold Medal for Art from Emperor Wilhelm II in 1910 and the Gold Medal at the Munich Art Exhibition in 1911; Appointed an honorary member of the Technical University of Danzig in 1926 and an honorary member of RWTH Aachen in 1929; his works are held in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich, exhibited at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition from 1894 onwards, at the Glaspalast in Munich, and at the Great Art Exhibitions in Düsseldorf and Dresden; member of the Association of Berlin Artists and the General German Art Cooperative; source: Thieme-Becker, Vollmer, Saur ‘Bio-Bibliographical Encyclopaedia of Artists’, Dressler and the internet.