Albert Christoph Dies
Encyclopedia
As painter
He was born at HanoverHanover
Hanover or Hannover, on the river Leine, is the capital of the federal state of Lower Saxony , Germany and was once by personal union the family seat of the Hanoverian Kings of Great Britain, under their title as the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg...
(baptized 11 February 1755), and began his studies there. For one year he studied in the academy of Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...
, and then he started at the age of twenty with thirty ducat
Ducat
The ducat is a gold coin that was used as a trade coin throughout Europe before World War I. Its weight is 3.4909 grams of .986 gold, which is 0.1107 troy ounce, actual gold weight...
s in his pocket for Rome, studying briefly on the way in Mannheim
Mannheim
Mannheim is a city in southwestern Germany. With about 315,000 inhabitants, Mannheim is the second-largest city in the Bundesland of Baden-Württemberg, following the capital city of Stuttgart....
and Basel
Basel
Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...
. In Rome he lived a frugal life till 1796; his son Johannes (Giovanni) was born there in 1776. Copying pictures, chiefly by Salvator Rosa
Salvator Rosa
Salvator Rosa was an Italian Baroque painter, poet and printmaker, active in Naples, Rome and Florence. As a painter, he is best known as an "unorthodox and extravagant" and a "perpetual rebel" proto-Romantic.-Early life:...
, for a livelihood, his taste led him to draw and paint from nature in Tivoli
Tivoli, Italy
Tivoli , the classical Tibur, is an ancient Italian town in Lazio, about 30 km east-north-east of Rome, at the falls of the Aniene river where it issues from the Sabine hills...
, Albano
Albano Laziale
Albano Laziale is a comune in the province of Rome, on the Alban Hills, in Latium, central Italy. It is also a suburb of Rome, which is 25 km distant. It is bounded by other communes of Castel Gandolfo, Rocca di Papa, Ariccia and Ardea. Located in the Castelli Romani area of Lazio...
and other picturesque places in the vicinity of Rome. Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
, the birthplace of his favorite master, he visited more than once for the same reasons.
Goethe visited him in 1787. The poet, interested in the theory of color, reported in his Zweiter römischer Aufenthalt "At the moment I am engaged in something from which I learn a great deal; I have found and sketched a landscape that a clever artist, Dies, colored in my presence; thus eyes and mind grow ever more accustomed to color and harmony."
During the Rome visit, Dies also composed music, though later on he apparently destroyed all that he has written, and none of it survives today.
At one point, Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David
Jacques-Louis David was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era...
, then composing his Oath of the Horatii
Oath of the Horatii
Oath of the Horatii , is a work by French artist Jacques-Louis David painted in 1784. It depicts a scene from a Roman legend about a dispute between two warring cities; Rome and Alba Longa, when three brothers from a Roman family, the Horatii, agree to end the war by fighting three brothers from an...
(1784) at Rome, wished to take him to Paris. But Dies had reasons for not accepting the offer. He was courting a young Roman whom he subsequently married. Meanwhile he had made the acquaintance of Volpato
Giovanni Volpato
Giovanni Volpato was an Italian engraver of the 18th century.He received his first training from his mother, an embroiderer, and then studied under Giovanni Antonio Remondini...
, for whom he executed numerous drawings, and this no doubt suggested the plan, which he afterwards carried out, of publishing, in partnership with Jacob Wilhelm Mechau, Johann Christian Reinhart
Johann Christian Reinhart
Johann Christian Reinhart was a German painter and engraver. He was one of the founders, along with Joseph Anton Koch, of German romantic classical landscape painting.-Biography:...
and Johann Friedrich Frauenholz, the series of plates known as the Collection de vues pittoresques de l'Italie, published in seventy-two sheets at Nuremberg
Nuremberg
Nuremberg[p] is a city in the German state of Bavaria, in the administrative region of Middle Franconia. Situated on the Pegnitz river and the Rhine–Main–Danube Canal, it is located about north of Munich and is Franconia's largest city. The population is 505,664...
in 1799.
In 1787 he swallowed by mistake three-quarters of an ounce of lead(II) acetate
Lead(II) acetate
Lead acetate , also known as lead acetate, lead diacetate, plumbous acetate, sugar of lead, lead sugar, salt of Saturn, and Goulard's powder, is a white crystalline chemical compound with a sweetish taste. It is made by treating lead oxide with acetic acid. Like other lead compounds, it is toxic...
. His recovery from this poison was slow and incomplete.
According to Gotwals (1968), "In May, 1796, Dies apparently eloped with a young girl to Salzburg
Salzburg
-Population development:In 1935, the population significantly increased when Salzburg absorbed adjacent municipalities. After World War II, numerous refugees found a new home in the city. New residential space was created for American soldiers of the postwar Occupation, and could be used for...
." The following year he moved to Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, and lived there on the produce of his brush as a landscape
Landscape art
Landscape art is a term that covers the depiction of natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, and especially art where the main subject is a wide view, with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works landscape backgrounds for figures can still...
painter, and on that of his pencil or graver as a draughtsman and etcher. He also taught landscape painting at the Imperial and Royal Academy, and later, in his final post, was gallery director to Prince Nikolaus Esterházy II. During this time his physical condition grew worse, and he even lost the use of one of his hands.
As biographer
Dies was a great admirer of the music of Joseph HaydnJoseph Haydn
Franz Joseph Haydn , known as Joseph Haydn , was an Austrian composer, one of the most prolific and prominent composers of the Classical period. He is often called the "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet" because of his important contributions to these forms...
and undertook to meet the composer and write his biography. He obtained an introduction from his fellow artist Anton Grassi, who had made a number of busts of Haydn. Over the course of three years during Haydn's old age (starting 15 April 1805, ending 8 August 1808), he made a series of 30 visits to the frail and ailing composer. On a number of occasions Haydn was unable to see him, but frequently Dies was admitted and was able to interview him. In 1810, one year after Haydn's death, Dies published a biography based on what he learned in his visits (see References below). This work is organized around the sequence of visits, reporting each in turn. It continues to serve as a substantial source of information on the composer's life.
Compared with another biography written at the same time by Georg August Griesinger
Georg August Griesinger
Georg August von Griesinger was a tutor and diplomat resident in Vienna during the late 18th and 19th centuries. He is remembered for his friendships with the composers Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven, and for the biography he wrote of Haydn....
, Dies's work is almost certainly less accurate and is more likely to have been sentimentalized and embellished. For instances of probable embellishment, see Mathias Haydn
Mathias Haydn
Matthias Haydn was the father of two famous composers, Joseph and Michael Haydn...
and Haydn and Mozart
Haydn and Mozart
The composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Haydn were friends. Their relationship is not very well documented, but the evidence that they enjoyed each other's company and greatly respected each other's work is strong.-Background:...
; for an apparent outright blunder, see Rebecca Schroeter
Rebecca Schroeter
Rebecca Schroeter was an amateur musician who lived in London during the 18th and early 19th centuries. She was the wife of the German composer Johann Samuel Schroeter, and later, during her years of widowhood, a love interest of Joseph Haydn.-Early life and marriage:She was born 1751 to Robert...
. Dies's translator Vernon Gotwals, comparing Dies to Griesinger, concludes:
- It is now clear that for facts about Haydn one will turn first to the Biographische Notizen of Griesinger, but that reliance upon that source alone would deprive Haydn's portrait of many authentic details, mixed inescapably with some imaginary ones. Dies's Biographische Nachrichten is the work of a sentimental artist who fancied himself a "universal man" but whose approach to the problem of biography was that of his time and place.
Assessment
The 11th edition Britannica, from whose text this encyclopedia borrows, has a fairly low opinion of Dies's work, as the following quotations indicate:- "[In Rome] he became a bold executant in water-colours and in oilOil paintingOil painting is the process of painting with pigments that are bound with a medium of drying oil—especially in early modern Europe, linseed oil. Often an oil such as linseed was boiled with a resin such as pine resin or even frankincense; these were called 'varnishes' and were prized for their body...
, though he failed to acquire any originality of his own." - "Lord Bristol, who encouraged him as a copyist, predicted that he would be a second Salvator Rosa. However, Dies did not have the creativity necessary to become a great artist."
- "With so many irons in the fire Dies naturally lost the power of concentration."
- "From two pictures now in the BelvedereBelvedere (palace)The Belvedere is a historical building complex in Vienna, Austria, consisting of two Baroque palaces the Upper and Lower Belvedere, the Orangery, and the Palace Stables. The buildings are set in a Baroque park landscape in the 3rd district of the city, south-east of its centre. It houses the...
gallery, and from numerous engraved drawings from the neighborhood of Tivoli, we gather that Dies was never destined to rise above a respectable mediocrity. He followed Salvator Rosa's example in imitating the manner of Claude Lorraine. But Salvator adapted the style of Claude, whilst Dies did no more than copy it."
According to Gotwals (1968), "Friedrich Noack in his article in the Thieme and Becker Allgemeines Lexicon der bildenden Künstler ["General lexicon of graphic artists"], describes Dies's work as clumsy, mediocre, and prosaic.
Gotwals adds, concerning Dies's writing, that "his literary style is hardly better."
External links
- The original printed edition of Dies's Haydn biography can be examined at the Don Juan Archive: .
- Albert Christoph Dies: (German) Biographische Nachrichten von Joseph Haydn. Wien: Camesinaische Buchhandlung, 1810.
- Images of Dies's paintings in the Cleveland Museum of ArtCleveland Museum of ArtThe Cleveland Museum of Art is an art museum situated in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on Cleveland's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian art, the museum houses a diverse permanent collection of more than 43,000...
: - Images of Dies's paintings in the Lichtenstein Museum, Vienna:
Ansicht des Leopoldinentempels
Oil on canvas, possession of the Esterházy family, Burgenland, Austria.
Projektierte Gartenfassade des Schlosses Esterházy
(planned garden facade of the Esterházy PalaceSchloss Esterházy
----The Schloss Esterházy is a palace in Eisenstadt, Austria, the capital of the Burgenland state. It was constructed in the late 13th century, and came under ownership of the Hungarian Esterházy family in 1622...
)
Oil on canvas, possession of the Esterházy family, Burgenland, Austria.
