Clarity and obscurity - selected works by Victor Emil Janssen

 

Self-Portrait at the Easel, circa 1828.

"Head of a man in left profile”, circa 1827-45.

"Profile portrait of Gebhard”, 1841

Portrait of Otto Rossbach, circa 1834.

Portrait of Leo Gebl, 1831.

Head of a Screaming Boy, 1834.

Self-portrait, 1827.

Self-portrait. Drawing dated 28 April 1843.

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Victor Emil Janssen (11 June 1807, Hamburg - 23 September 1845, Hamburg), German painter of the late Romantic period. The illegitimate son of a wine merchant's daughter, he was a student at Hamburg's Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums before attending Siegfried Bendixen's drawing school in 1823/24. Three years later he went to study at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste München in Munich, There he joined the Hamburg painters Carl Koch and Friedrich Wasmann, with whom he became very close, and was connected with the Hamburg artist colony in Munich. In the fall of 1833 he traveled to Rome on a scholarship and lived there with Wasmann, both artists being close to the group of German artists known as the Nazarenes. By the time he returned to Munich, his pre-existing mental illness had worsened, compounded by tuberculosis of the bone. He became increasingly alienated from his circle of friends, but still found work assisting with the frescoes in the Abbey of St. Boniface in Munich, but soon had to give up the commission as his mental and physical condition deteriorated. Before returning home to Hamburg in 1843, he destroyed most of his works. (Of what remained, some were given to Carl Koch, while the rest were bequeathed to Friedrich Wasmann.) Janssen died two years later at the age of thirty-eight.

Self-Portrait in a Red Cap, unfinished, destroyed by fire, 1931.

This painting was part of the collections of the Hamburger Kunsthalle and was destroyed on 6 June 1931, when it was temporarily in Munich as part of an exhibition on German romantic art, “Works of German romantics from Caspar David Friedrich to Moritz von Schwind”. The fire was an arson and totally destroyed the building that housed the exhibition - the Glaspalast - together with more than one hundred and ten works of art that were part of the temporary exhibition and three thousand of the permanent collection.