Cove Landing

The Wittgenstein Family Album, a rare collection of 25 interior watercolors

The Wittgenstein Family Album is a rare collection of 25 interior watercolors documenting the princely family’s various residences in Russia, Germany, Italy and France during the second quarter of the 19th century. Historically important visual records, these meticulously rendered “room portraits” reveal a great deal about the epoch’s domestic architecture, furnishings and taste. The cumulative effect tells a story reflecting a way of life among an extended family. It further reveals how certain furnishings were transported from house to house as family relations seasonally toured between residences. Vividly depicting largely unpeopled rooms, the album is a bird’s eye view into a way of life and an unspoken pride of possession. Rooms are portrayed with faithful accuracy -- an artistic fidelity suitable to a favorite family member -- as if to suggest the interior is personified as a dear friend.

Feeling the pinch after the Napoleonic Wars, Western Europe’s nobility and aristocracy set the stage for new standards of more modest, comfortable living. An intellectual shift towards privacy
coupled with the cultivation of a simpler life became fertile ground for new sensibilities at home. Enormous efforts were made to decorate with innovative taste that often favored surprisingly simple characteristics. The Biedermeier world, in particular, unfolded in Austria and Germany circa 1815-1848, a time capsule between Europe’s post-war and pre- Industrial Revolution. Interior decoration became a small miracle of amenity and a prevalent philosophy was to kindle nature indoors. Many of these sheets reveal an abundance of plant life. One cannot help but to note a cheerful array of floral prints and colorful textiles, rooms brimful with potted specimens from the greenhouse and verdant screens of foliage, or a conservatory addition where exotic fruit such as a home-grown pineapple is exactingly depicted on a serving dish.

The custom of painting a room for its own sake -- as opposed to the anecdotal background of a portrait - grew into a flourishing artistic genre during the early 19th century. As this effort predates the advent of photography, the tradition is further of notable importance. Typically these works were kept in family albums, personal records of favorite residences, as opposed to being displayed on the wall. Dates of the present works span approximately a decade between 1834 and 1843. The popular, artistic pastime of recording a room was avidly practiced by European nobility and gentry, particularly ladies of the house. Equally, trained artists were privately commissioned to portray changing taste in decoration; some of the finest enliven space by capturing reflected sunlight and shadow on parquetry flooring while animating perspective views of rooms enfilade.

A mixture of skilled and lesser-known artistic hands is represented in the Wittgenstein Family Album. German artist Edouard Gaertner (1801 – 1877) is responsible for two highly accomplished views, A bedroom in the Wittgensteins’ Berlin House and A Room at a house in Potsdam, both dated 1836; his
contemporary Friedrich Wilhelm Klose (1814 – 1863) who was well-known for recording interiors designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel is responsible for A Salon in the Wittgensteins’ Berlin house, 1841. The Viennese artist Sotira about whom little is known, not even his full name, is responsible for seven renderings all completed in Russia between 1835 – 1838; French architectural painter and watercolorist Francois Etienne Villeret (1800 – 1866) has painted five of the Wittgensteins’ Parisian interiors with admirable technique.

The Wittgenstein Album is one of only a few remaining family albums of its type in private hands. It was published in Charlotte Gere’s Nineteenth Century Interiors: An Album of Watercolors (Thames and Hudson, 1992) and exhibited in the same year at The Frick Collection, New York City. As the late Charles Ryskamp, former Director of The Frick Collection, notes in his preface to Charlotte Gere’s above-mentioned book, “Collections of such watercolors still exist in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle, showing the numerous residences of Queen Victoria, and albums are owned by The Queen of the Netherlands, the Princess of Hesse and the Prince of Bavaria; an example with views of the Hofburg painted by Johann Stephan Decker is now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art... (This) collection presents a very rare example of an album showing a single princely family’s taste and life.”