(Schinkel) Kugler, Franz
Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Eine Characteristik seiner künstlerischen Wirksamkeit.
Berlin, George Gropius 1842.
Full Description
8vo. Engraved portrait frontispiece, 152pp, folding leaf with specimen of Schinkel’s handwriting. Nineteenth century quarter cloth, marbled boards, original front printed wrapper bound in. Wrapper carries ink presentation inscription dated 1842 to the author’s “geliebte Freund Grüneisen”. Some light spotting and browning, chiefly on outer blank margins, but a better copy than that previously listed by us in our Cat 61.
The first biography of Schinkel, written by his younger contemporary Franz Theodor Kugler (1808-1858), the leading German historian of art and architecture in the 1840s and 1850s. Kugler based it in part on an article on Schinkel that he had written for the Hallische Jahrbuch in 1838, while Schinkel was still alive, but as recast for publication in 1842 it took on a different shape and it includes a wholly new section dealing with Schinkel’s youthful career as a painter of scenic panoramas for a leading Berlin entrepreneur. Kugler is generally excellent on Schinkel’s architectural and artistic ventures, and his narrative still well repays reading, not least for its commentary on the designs by Schinkel that were published in Schinkel’s own Sammlung Architektonischer Entwürfe. The copy that we catalogue here has the added interest that it carries a presentation inscription to Kugler’s close friend, and fellow art historian, Carl Grüneisen (1802-1878).