RKD STUDIES

The art of the Frankfurt still-life painters Abraham Mignon and Jacob Marrel didn’t die out with the 17th century. One of the first in this field to pick up the tradition of the older Frankfurt masters, and therefore of the old Dutch masters, was the Saftleven adept Christian Georg Schütz I (1718-1791). His flower paintings are usually worth looking at.¹

Justus Juncker (1703-1767), who was almost the same age, was a master in this subject. Again it was the collection of Heinrich Jakob baron von Häckel, that brought him into contact with Dutch paintings. In the beginning Juncker preferred to copy the interior scenes of Thomas Wijck and related masters (etching after Wijck of 1749).² He painted a series of kitchen scenes in the taste of Cornelis Saftleven, Adriaen van Ostade and Thomas Wyck [1-4].³

The still-life element in them gradually took on greater importance, until he at last devoted himself exclusively to still-life and flower painting. They are neat works in the manner of Jan Davidsz de Heem and of Jan van Huijsum [5-8]. From the few words, with which Goethe characterized his art, we feel how Dutch his creations were perceived: ‘Juncker, who very cleanly executed flower- and fruit pieces, still-lifes and quietly occupied people after the manner of the Dutch masters’.

1
Justus Juncker
Kitchen-interior, dated 1765
Frankfurt am Main, Städel Museum, inv./cat.nr. SG 124

2
Justus Juncker
Scholar in his study

His pupil and son-in-law Johann Daniel Bager (1734-1815) was rightly praised, as his still-lifes of the 1780s would have done full justice to a Willem van Aelst and Abraham Mignon [9-11]. His portraits are not in the way of the old masters and his depictions of interiors, especially the rendering of the painting cabinet of the Frankfurt collector Gogel II, are constructed according to Flemish prescriptions [12].⁴

9
Johann Daniel Bager
Fruit still life, before 1805
Basel (Switzerland), private collection Henle

A brother of Johann Andreas Benjamin Nothnagel, Johann Christian Benjamin Nothnagel (1734-?), is lauded by Von Gwinner as a flower painter [13].⁵ The amateur and collector Andreas Joseph Chandelle (1743-1820) copied his own picture collection in pastel [14-17];⁶ especially highlighted are his copies of dead rooster and hares by Abraham Mignon and Jan Weenix ‘with […] the many grains in the wood’, in other words the rendition of a trompe-l’oeil painting.⁷

A speciality for Frankfurt were the depictions of church interiors. Johann Ludwig Ernst Morgenstern (1738-1819),⁸ a pupil of Christian Georg Schütz and Johann Andreas Benjamin Nothnagel, excelled in this. He also visited the academy of Salzdahlum and worked in Hamburg and Darmstadt. He must have studied Dutch art everywhere, as he exclusively painted church interiors in the style of the Neeffs and the Steenwijcks, who had been in Frankfurt. Usually they are fantasy buildings [18-19], but sometimes he also strictly followed the example of the churches of Frankfurt [20-24].⁹

18
Johann Ludwig Ernst Morgenstern
Church interior, dated 1776
Frankfurt am Main, Historisches Museum Frankfurt, inv./cat.nr. hmf.B.2015.002

Morgenstern was a restorer of paintings, which gave him the idea to copy his own works on a small scale and to put these tiny versions in three cupboards, after the example of the Prehn cabinet. His son Johann Friedrich Morgenstern (1777-1844) added a further 48 copies and his grandson Karl yet another, so that the Cabinet, when it was sold in 1857 to England, contained around 200 copies, half of which are after Dutch paintings. In Gwinner all the names are listed, which gives us an overview of the kind of Dutch paintings in the Frankfurt collections of the time: the minor masters of landscape and genre prevail.¹⁰

The Swiss Christian Stöcklin I (1741-1795) settled in 1764 in Frankfurt and painted imaginary church interiors in a similar style [25-27]. It is said, that that he learned architectural painting in Italy with Antonio Galli di Bibiena, but his church paintings from Frankfurt are no less Netherlandish than those of Morgenstern, who occasionally provided his works with staffage figures. A younger Friedrich Stöcklin (1770-1828) cultivated this genre somewhat less schematically even in a later era [28-29].

25
Christian Stöcklin (I)
Interior of a picture gallery, signed 1775
New York City, art dealer Otto Naumann Ltd.