Portrait of the artist’s studio assistant, Ernst Ewald (1836-1904), aged 13

Monogrammed and dated lower left: MAP /  49.

Oil on canvas

68.4 x 58.6 cm. (27 x 23 in.)

Provenance:

Professor Ernst Ewald (1836 – 1904), Berlin;

By inheritance to his wife, Frau J. Ewald, Berlin;

Private Collection, Düsseldorf.

Literature:

H. von Tschudi, Ausstellung deutscher Kunst aus der Zeit von 1775-1875 in der Königlichen Nationalgalerie, vol. 2, Berlin 1906, p. 1428-29, no. 1337c, illustrated;

J. Puciata-Pawlowska, ‘Maksymilian Antonio Piotrowski’ in Studia Pomorskie, vol II, Wroclaw 1957, p. 468, illustrated, and p. 521, no. 113.

Exhibited:

Ausstellung deutscher Kunst aus der Zeit von 1775-1875 in der Königlichen Nationalgalerie, Berlin 1906.

Painted in Berlin on the 30^th of March 1849, this portrait of a young studio assistant, the future artist and museum director Ernst Ewald, is by Maksymilian Antoni Piotrowski. Last seen publicly in 1906, the portrait is a significant reappearance not just within the artist’s oeuvre but also within the wider context of 19^th-century Polish art, given Piotrowski’s status as a leading Polish cultural figure.

Piotrowski was born in Bydgoszcz in 1813, at a time of great national tragedy for the Polish people. Following a protracted political, military, and economic decline, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was partitioned in the late-18^th century between the Hapsburgs, Prussia and Russia, leading to Poland’s elimination as a nation state. Growing up in the Prussian sphere, Piotrowski was able to move to Berlin in 1833 to continue his artistic education at the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts, studying under Wilhelm Hensel, a leading history painter and portraitist. The young Polish artist soon gained a name for himself, winning First Prize at the Academy in 1838, the final year of his studies. From the beginning, and following Hensel, Piotrowski developed a predilection for genre scenes, religious paintings and portraits, subjects in which the young artist would make his name.

After graduation, Piotrowski embarked on a tour of Germany, spending time in Düsseldorf, then a leading artistic centre in the Germanophone world. Here he studied with Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow, a proponent of the Nazarene movement, whose sentimental and idealistic style influenced Piotrowski in his own work. In 1842 Piotrowski finished his artistic education with a trip to Rome, where he met other Nazarene painters such as Johann Friedrich Overbeck, before journeying through Italy the following year, painting idealised and romantic scenes of Italian life which were later exhibited in Berlin.

Piotrowksi returned to Berlin via Munich, another important artistic destination at the time. Back in Prussia, the artist began to exhibit regularly, gaining considerable renown for his work, particularly his genre scenes and portraits. However, 1848 would mark turning point in his life. A revolutionary wave spread across Europe, leading to upheaval and political change. In Berlin, Piotrowski took part in freedom demonstrations and was arrested. Upon his release, he returned to Bydogoszcz and then visited Poznań, taking part in the Greater Poland Uprising, an unsuccessful military insurrection against Prussian forces. However, the collapse of the Revolution, combined with a lack of artistic opportunities, led to Piotrowski’s return to Berlin in 1849. Despite its failure, the Revolution profoundly marked Piotrowski’s sense of identity and thus also his artistic output. Considered, culturally-speaking, as a German artist, Piotrowski henceforth pushed his Polish credentials to the fore and would go on to paint a number of works highlighting his patriotic sentiments.

Later in the same year Piotrowski was named professor at the Königsberg Academy of Fine Arts, a prestigious post which the artist kept for the remainder of his life. Though Piotrowski was part of the Prussian artistic elite, Polish motifs remained a constant in his work and he would regularly exhibit his paintings in Kraków. His most famous painting, The Death of Wanda, exhibited in both Kraków and Berlin in 1859, perhaps best displays this paradox: it illustrates one of the most important popular legends from the pre-history of Poland and yet is painted very much in a monumental German Romantic style.

The present work dates to a seminal moment in the Piotrowski’s life, painted just after his return to Berlin following the artist’s participation in the Polish uprising. Stylistically, Piotrowski continues to be influenced by the sentimentality of the Düsseldorf School, though a strain of realism, absent in his previous work, begins to make itself felt. We are clearly looking at a young studio assistant, posing confidently, hand on hip, in the corner of Piotrowski’s atelier. The assistant, with piercing hazel eyes and tumbling black locks, engages directly with the viewer. He wears a red tasselled cap of a type favoured by artists at this time. On the walls behind him are pinned several works in grisaille, one of which shows a bearded man wearing a wide-brimmed hat, perhaps some sort of cavalier. The assistant rests his other hand on a side-table, upon which is propped a rolled-up sheet.

The studio assistant depicted here is Ernst Ewald, painter and future director of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Berlin. The portrait was in the collection of his wife when exhibited in 1906 and a label on the reverse, in her hand, states it to be of Ernst at the age of thirteen. Indeed Ewald, born in Berlin in 1836, would have been thirteen in 1849 and resident of the Prussian capital. Though he did not amount to much as an artist, Ewald had greater success as a museum director and arts instructor, giving drawing lessons to the future Kaiser Wilhelm and his brother Prince Henry, and acting as an advisor to their father Kaiser Friedrich III.

The portrait is clearly linked, stylistically and thematically, to Piotrowksi’s famous self-portrait in the Bydgoszcz Museum, painted six weeks before on the 12^th of April 1849. Piotrowski, the self-assured Polish nationalist, scrutinises his own features through narrowed eyes. Red and white, the colours of the Polish flag, feature prominently, as they do in the portrait of the studio assistant. Both works exhibit a new direction, and perhaps confidence, in Piotrowski’s art and thus are both key works within his oeuvre.