Gari Melchers: The Curriculum at the Royal Academy, Düsseldorf

"The Embroideress, Portrait of Mrs.
Hitchcock" by Gari Melchers

"The Royal Academy of Art at Düsseldorf, which Gari Melchers entered in 1877, was among the many art institutions that sprang up in mid-eighteenth-century Europe. Although the academy was founded in 1773, it was only after the appointment of Friedrich Wilhelm von Schadow as director in 1826 that the academy came into its own as one of the most important European art schools of the nineteenth century. 

The program of study stressed the development of the technical skills necessary to achieve precise realism. Emphasis was placed on drawing, which was studied for two full years before oil painting was broached.The initial class involved tonal studies from prints, as well as some simple renderings from plaster casts. The second class consisted of study from antique sculpture with an emphasis placed on precision of outline and modeling. The fundamentals of anatomy, proportion and perspective were also introduced at this level. Study of two-dimensional and threeo0dimensional artworks was augmented by portrait drawings done from life. Only after students had successfully completed a full-scale drawing of a plaster figure could they advance to the upper0level classes and begin to master the medium of oil paint. Painstaking care in the meticulous rendering of both outline and tone was stressed at all levels.

The drawing method practiced at the royal academy involved a two-stage process of laying in the outline and then rendering the main masses of light and shade. Such care was taken with each drawing that as much as two weeks were required for the study and execution of a single head, with the outline alone taking as long as two or three days to complete. The results of so demanding a procedure are clearly evident in Melchers' drawing, which is remarkable for its precision and clarity.

A painting entitled 'The Gamekeeper' which also dates from this period shows a dark palette was used of predominant browns relieved only by the neutral gray of the workman's shirt and the off-white accents of his collar. The similarity of this student work with many of Melchers' paintings of later years shows that he did indeed retain much of what he learned at Düsseldorf after his tenure of study at the institution was over. Although the texture and details of objects are lost to a more painterly style in the later works, the artist still employed the solid modeling and clearly rendered contours that he had mastered at the German art school."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "Gari Melchers: His Life and Art" by Joseph G. Dreiss.)