A Baroque portrait recently entered the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt’s collection as a gift from private ownership. The work in question is a self-portrait by Johann Christian Fiedler (1697-1765), painted c. 1725. On 28 November 1725, Landgrave Ernst Ludwig (1667-1739) appointed Fiedler Darmstadt Court Painter; his appointment was probably the occasion of this imposing self-presentation. Over his lifetime, Fiedler painted numerous self-portraits, two of which have been in the museum’s collection for over two hundred years. Because the exact number of Fiedler’s self-portraits has still not been determined, initially clues as to this particular painting’s provenance seemed rather rare.
Examination of its provenance determined that the painting, an old family heirloom, had been in the possession of the Darmstadt City Pastor Kleberger. Karl Kleberger (1862-1941) hailed from near Butzbach and lived in the region from 1892 onwards. He was first appointed Pastor in Groß-Umstadt and in 1899 became City Pastor of Darmstadt. A “Frau Pfarrer Kleberger, née Buchner” is documented as the painting’s owner in 1919, in a monograph on Fiedler composed by the former Grand Ducal Chamberlain and later Director of the Castle Museum, Kuno von Hardenberg. The monograph also contains an illustration of the painting. But where was the work during the National Socialist era, between 1933 and 1945?
The catalogue accompanying the 1930 exhibition “Zweihundert Jahre Darmstädter Malerei” records as item number 118 a self-portrait by Fiedler, owned by “Pastor Kleeberger, Darmstadt”. So we can assume that this is indeed the work in question, even though it is not depicted in the catalogue, and neither its dimensions nor any other descriptive details are provided. On Kleberger’s death in 1941, his oldest daughter inherited the painting, and it thus left Darmstadt three years before the devastating firebombing of the city in the night of 11-12 September 1944, in which large areas of the city were destroyed. Since then it has remained in the family’s possession, and since 2011 it has been on permanent loan to the museum.
Dr. Udo Felbinger