Franz Xaver Winterhalter: Apprenticeship

"Self-Portrait" at 17 years of age
pencil on paper
by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

"Within a year of the young Winterhalter's arrival, his teacher, Karl Ludwig Schuler, was appointed as Director of the Institute for the Arts established by the publishing house of Herder. His eight apprentices went with him, and boarded at Herder's, to become part of a team of engravers and lithographers producing the illustrated books for which Herder was famous. 

The young Winterhalter wrote to his parents of the bullying he suffered from the other apprentices, of the bad language they used, of Bartholomaus Herder's rages at their ingratitude and of his own determination to be a religious painter. He worked on copper-plate engravings of peasant scenes, religious subjects for Bible illustrations and on lithographic reproductions of famous works of art. His artistic training was not neglected, and there are several surviving drawings by him from plaster casts of Classical busts, as well as animal studies and sporting scenes. 

In 1819, Winterhalter was joined by his eleven-year-old brother Fidel, or Hermann, as he would become known. Their lives were simple and circumscribed. By 1822, the two brothers were living in lodgings in the town and beginning to draw from life. Winterhalter's surviving life studies show a stronger grasp of form, and a surer technique, than his drawings of busts. His sense of his own achievement and his self-evident talent, coupled with an ambition to get on, soon made his restive at the Herder Institute. He wanted to pursue his career in less restrictive and provincial surroundings, and he was encouraged in his desire to move by Baron Eichtal. 

The irascible Herder, however, was not prepared to release his gifted apprentice without a fight. He complained to Winterhalter's father: 

'For some time now, the disgusting ingratitude of my apprentices has made me positively ill, and it gets worse and worse...the revolutionary conduct in my Institute I will not tolerate. I would sooner dismiss all my ungrateful and unwilling apprentices at once than allow myself to be played with. The parents are very much to blame.' 

But a compromise was worked out. Winterhalter would be allowed to leave the following year to train in Munich, while Hermann remained with Herder at the Institute." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from the introduction, by Richard Ormund, to "Franz Xaver Winterhalter and the Courts of Europe 1830-70.")