Abstract
Throughout the mid to late nineteenth century, a new group of academic painters trained in Germany emerged as self-appointed ethnographic experts who sketched and painted heroic visions of a wild American West, and a similarly wild North Africa and Middle East. This group of artists, like their literary analog, traveled to the places they depicted. Artists Adolf Hoeffler (1825-1898), Carl Wimar (1828-1862), Friedrich Frisch (1813-1886), Adolf Schreyer (1828-1899) and Eugen Bracht (1842-1921) fused their artistic personae with their subjects to present themselves as ethnographic experts depicting scenes that asserted their own empirical authority as observers. They not only exhibited their art, but also published travel accounts and conducted public lectures reporting on the peoples and places they had visited. Hoeffler and Wimar traveled to the American West. Frisch, Bracht and Schreyer were Orientalists. The reception of their work is tied to the imperial aspirations and entrepreneurial possibilities their artistic subjects represented for the American and German public who read their travel writing and bought their art.
Committee Chair
Elizabeth Childs
Committee Members
Angela Miller, Lynne Tatlock
Degree
Master of Arts (AM/MA)
Author's Department
Art History & Archaeology
Document Type
Thesis
Date of Award
Summer 8-2014
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/K7SB43PJ
Recommended Citation
Griesbach, Sarah Hermes, "Benign Imperialists: Ethnographic (mis)Representation by German Painter-Adventurers, 1840-1890" (2014). Arts & Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 9.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/K7SB43PJ
Comments
Permanent URL: https://doi.org/10.7936/K7SB43PJ