Friedrich Overbeck

Born: Lübeck, 3 July 1789

Died: Rome, 12 November 1869

Nationality: German


Works by this Artist

Joseph Sold by His Brothers
Friedrich Overbeck, 1816-17

Background

son of a lawyer-politician, mayor of Lübeck

Studies

with Joseph Nikolaus Peroux (1804); with Alfred H. Maurer at Vienna Academy (Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, 1806-09)

Career

1806 – meets Franz Pforr at Vienna Academy

1809 – co-founds Nazarenes (Lukasbund), with Franz Pforr, Ludwig Vogel, Joseph Wintergerst, Joseph Sutter and Johann Konrad Hottinger

1810 – moves to Rome with Nazarenes, establishes artist cooperative at monastery of San Isidoro

1812 – Franz Pforr drowns, Nazarenes disband, Overbeck converts to Catholicism

1816-18 - Casa Bartholdy frescoes: Story of Joseph (now Nationalgalerie, Berlin)

1857 –commission from Pope Piux IX: Christ Evading his Pursuers on the Mountain near Nazareth, 1857 (Quirinale Palace, Rome)

Travels

Rome (1810-69)

Commissions from

Salomon Bartholdy (Prussian Consul in Rome); Marchese Carlo Massimo; Pope Pius IX

Important Artworks

Italia and Germania, 1811 and 1815-20 (Neue Pinokothek, Munich)

Adoration of the Magi, 1811-13 (Kunsthalle, Hamburg)

Readings

Andrews, Keith. The Nazarenes: A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964

Frank, Mitchell Benjamin. German Romantic Painting Redefined. Nazarene Tradition and the Narratives of Romanticism. Aldershot, UK-Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2001.

Grewe, Cordula. Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009

Heise, Brigitte. Friedrich Overbeck: Das kunstlerische Werk und seine Literarischen und autobiographischen Quellen (Pictura et poesis). Vienna: Bohlau, 1999 (in German)

Morowitz, Laura. Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000

Vaughan, William. German Romanticism and English Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979

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