1070 - August von der Embde

August von der Embde Portrait of the Artist's Daughter, the Painter Caroline Klauhold von der Embde, in Hessian Costume Oil on canvas. 98 x 79.5 cm. Certificate Dr Marianne Heinz, Kassel, 10.5.2012 (copy). Provenance L. E. Grimm (label on the reverse). - Private collection, Germany. Exhibitions Ausstellung des Halberstädter Kunstvereins anlässlich der Statutengebung am 30. Januar, Kunstverein Halberstadt, 1834. - Ausstellung in der Akademie der Künste, Dresden 1835. Literature Exhib. Cat: Verzeichniß der vom 2. August 1835 an in der Königl. Sächs. Akademie der Künste zu Dresden öffentlich ausgestellten Kunstwerke. Dresden 1835, p. 30, no. 442. - F. von Boetticher: Malerwerke des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Bd. I,1. Dresden 1891-1901 (Reprint Leipzig 1941), p. 264. no. 1. Caroline Klauhold, née von der Embde (1812, Kassel – 1867, Hamburg) was a German portrait, genre and landscape painter, and one of the four daughters of the Kassel painter August von der Embde and his wife Sophie Charlotte, née Henschel (1787–1856). A sketch for this painting is held in the Graphic Arts Collection in Kassel; a comparable oil study has been in the Neue Galerie Kassel since 1958. The connection with the work offered here had not previously been recognised (cf. M. Heinz, Catalogue of 19th-Century Paintings, Museumslandschaft Hessen, Kassel, 2nd ed., p. 66). The painting is thought to have been created in 1833 to mark the silver wedding anniversary of August von der Embde and Sophie Charlotte Henschel. It seems likely that Caroline, then aged 21 and the eldest of their children, was depicted as a family gift to mark the wedding anniversary. The depiction can be interpreted within the context of the Romantic ideology prevalent in the Kassel circle of the Brothers Grimm, to which von der Embde had belonged since his marriage in 1808 at the latest. The young woman’s pensive demeanour, the spotted hemlock half-hidden in the shade, and the red carnation in bloom on the left of the picture – commonly known as ‘God’s blood’ – symbolise the dark side of Romanticism: melancholy. In 1854, 21 years after the painting was created, the woman depicted in it married the lawyer Carl Alfred Klauhold, who was six years her younger.