
Karl
Friedrich Hermann Lungkwitz (1813-1891) was an Early Texas landscape
painter and photographer. Hermann Lungkwitz was born on March 14,
1813 in Halle-an-der-Saale, Saxony, while Napoleon's artillery
bombarded the city. The majority of three hundred fifty extant
Lungkwitz works are pencil and oil studies from Europe. His Romantic
landscape paintings of the Texas Hill Country, old San Antonio, its
Spanish missions, and Austin, were painted over four decades,
documenting nineteenth-century Texas. Two pre-Civil War lithographs
(Dr. Ernest Kapp's Water-Cure, Comal County, Texas and
Fredericksburg, Texas) and one postwar lithograph (San Antonio de
Bexar) have been identified.
Lungkwitz
completed his paintings in his studio, based on careful pencil
drawings done at favorite locales like Enchanted Rock, Bear
Mountain, and other promontories north of Fredericksburg, which
Lungkwitz called the Granite Mountains, and the Guadalupe,
Pedernales, Llano, and Colorado river valleys. Reflecting his
training at the Dresden Academy, his detailed paintings are luminous
with bright earth colors.
Lungkwitz
studied with Adrian Ludwig Richter, a Romantic landscapist, at the
Royal Academy in Dresden from 1840-1843. Lungkwitz received a
certificate of achievement from the Academy for a view of the Elbe
River in the latter year. During three summers, he painted the
Austrian Salzkammergut and Upper Bavarian Alps. Until 1850, when he
emigrated to America with his family, Lungkwitz was probably a
professional artist in Dresden. He may have had to flee Saxony
because of participation in the revolution of 1848-49 and
insurrection against the Saxon king in May 1849.
After six
months in Wheeling, West Virginia, Lungkwitz, his artist
brother-in-law Friedrich Richard Petri, and their families, left for
Texas. He arrived in New Braunfels in July 1851, remaining six
months before moving west to Fredericksburg, where they settled on a
farm in 1852, where Lungkwitz remained until 1864. Not surprisingly,
on the harsh, hill-country frontier, the two artists could not make
a living from their painting, so they resorted to farming and
raising cattle.
When Petri died in
1857, Lungkwitz learned photography, a profession that he followed
in San Antonio with Carl G. von Iwonskiqv from 1866 until 1870.
Between 1859 and 1861 Lungkwitz, Wilhelm Carl Augustus Thielepape,
and photographer William
DeRyee, visited New Braunfels, Austin, the
Texas Hill Country, Indianola, and towns along the Mississippi and
Ohio Rivers exhibiting their works and giving magic-lantern shows.
Moving to Austin in 1870, he was
employed as a draftsman and photographer for the General Land
Office. His daughter Martha may have been the first woman employee
of the state of Texas when she was appointed a clerk in the Office.
Lungkwitz apparently did not paint during his tenure on this job.
When he lost his employment in 1874 after a change in political
administration, he began to paint again in and around Austin and the
Texas Hill Country for the next fifteen years.
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During
the 1870s and the 1880s, he also gave lessons and taught at the
German-American Ladies College, Alta Vista Institute, and the Austin
Female Collegiate Institute, all in Austin, and apparently run by his
son-in-law Jacob Bickler. He also worked on the sheep ranch of his
daughter Eva Klappenbach near Johnson City and gave private art lessons
in Austin and Galveston, where he periodically visited the Bicklers
after they moved there in 1887.
Lungkwitz'
shared a studio with artist William Henry Huddle, painting, it is said,
the landscape parts of Huddle's painting of Santa Ana's surrender and
portrait of Davey Crockett, which now hang in the foyer of the Texas
State Capitol in Austin. Lungkwitz lived, in 1891, with Jacob Bickler in
Galveston. Karl Lungkwitz died of pneumonia on February 10, 1891,
at the Austin home of his daughter Helene von Rosenberg and was buried
in Oakwood Cemetery there.
Lungkwitz was nearly forgotten for a generation after his death, but his
works, along with those of Richard Petri, have been exhibited in Texas
museums and universities since the 1930s. Examples of both artists' work
can be found at the Texas Memorial Museum, University of Texas at
Austin; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Amon Carter Museum, Fort
Worth; and the San Antonio Museum Association. Lungkwitz was given a
major exhibition by the University of Texas Institute of
Texan Cultures at San Antonio in 1983-84.
Other collections
holding the work of Karl Hermann Lungkwitiz include the Center for
American History; Governors Mansion, Austin (lent by Witte Museum, San
Antonio); Capitol Historical Artifact Collection, Austin; Comfort
Historical Museum; Dallas Historical Society; Torch Energy Advisors,
Inc., Houston; Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, and Witte
Museum, San Antonio; and San Antonio Public Library.
Lungkwitz's exhibitions include:
Yanaguana Society Exhibition of Old San
Antonio Paintings
Centennial Exhibition of Early San Antonio
Paintings
The Early Scene: San Antonio
Remembering the Alamo: The Development of a
Texas Symbol
The Art and Craft of Early Texas (1988),
Source:
John and Deborah Powers, "Texas
Painters, Sculptors, and Graphic Artists"
AskArt.com


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