A significant collection of Romantic landscape drawings in the HMLD was investigated
During a systematic analysis of the HLMD’s Graphic Collection, some 150 works by Johann Heinrich Schilbach (1798-1851) were identified as belonging to the museum’s pre-1918 inventory. The greater part of the drawings probably originated from Schilbach’s estate, preserved by his widow, who died in 1890. These include two prominent groups of drawings: the first bears on the reverse a handwritten accession number beginning with “K 07”. The “K” stands for “Kupferstichkabinett” or Print Room, the predecessor of today’s Graphic Collection. “07” indicates the year 1907. “K 07” is followed by a serial number, for instance “K 07:345”. This numbering system suggests the existence of an inventory created in 1907 and subsequently lost. Unfortunately, the accession ledgers for this part of the collection have been preserved only from 1908 onwards.
The second group has been pasted onto a large piece of backing paper, mounted on grey-green cardboard, and adorned with a gold-coloured bead-and-reel border. The reverse of each drawing is thus not accessible, and it can only be surmised that it too bears a “K 07” number. According to an oral tradition, the drawings were mounted on green cardboard in order to present them in the museum’s art school, founded in 1907. Stylistically, this particular shade of green, popular in Jugendstil art, and the neoclassical gold-coloured bead-and-reel border would fit this time frame. For instance, works by Carl Rottmann (1797-1850) in the collection are mounted on similar green cardboard. Originally, each piece of green cardboard bore, centred under the drawing, the grand ducal museum’s stamp. Since many of these historical mountings were trimmed along their lower edge at an unknown date, the museum stamp normally found there is missing. Comparing trimmed and untrimmed cardboard mountings leads to the conclusion that this method of mounting drawings was a speciality of the HLMD. Any suspicion of confiscation resulting from National Socialist persecution may thus, for these two groups of drawings, be excluded.
A third group bore simply the HLMD’s stamp on the reverse. Since this stamp was used between 1919 and 1944, it is no reliable indication as to when the drawings were acquired by the museum.
Dr. Udo Felbinger
