DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.62134#0101
THE BOISSEREE BROTHERS. 93
This Boisseree Gallery is interesting from many points
of view. When Napoleon had rifled Italy and Germany of
their most precious works of art, and assembled them in
the Museum at Paris in a grand exhibition in the year 1803,
there might have been seen three young Germans day after
day, week after week, month after month, studying these
art-treasures, and studying especially certain quaint old
pictures by an early German master. These youths were
Sulpiz and Melchior Boisseree, together with their friend
Johann Bertram,—all three from the good old city of
Cologne. These quaint pictures in the Paris gallery re-
minded the three friends of certain pictures of a similar
character which they remembered to have seen hanging in
their childhood dim and forgotten in dusky side chapels and
cloisters in their native city. These memories inflamed
their imaginations, whilst their taste and understandings
were being daily developed by the study of the noble works
of art assembled in Paris, and by intercourse with Frederick
Schlegel, then resident at Paris, and who delivered private
lectures on philosophy and belles lettres to the three youths.
A deep interest thus awoke within them for this early and
almost forgotten school of painting—an interest which
deepened gradually into an absorbing passion, and became
the one object of their lives.
Returning to Cologne after a nine months’ sojourn in
Paris, and accompanied by Frederick Schlegel, they com-
menced an earnest quest after the old paintings which
lingered in their memories like dreams.
Great changes had of course taken place in Cologne upon
the suppression of the monasteries under Napoleon’s rule ■,
and the revolution occasioned among pictures was not the
least of the revolutions. Strange tidings reached the three
youths and Schlegel, of paintings used to patch dove-cotes
with ; of paintings turned into table-tops, and into screens;
This Boisseree Gallery is interesting from many points
of view. When Napoleon had rifled Italy and Germany of
their most precious works of art, and assembled them in
the Museum at Paris in a grand exhibition in the year 1803,
there might have been seen three young Germans day after
day, week after week, month after month, studying these
art-treasures, and studying especially certain quaint old
pictures by an early German master. These youths were
Sulpiz and Melchior Boisseree, together with their friend
Johann Bertram,—all three from the good old city of
Cologne. These quaint pictures in the Paris gallery re-
minded the three friends of certain pictures of a similar
character which they remembered to have seen hanging in
their childhood dim and forgotten in dusky side chapels and
cloisters in their native city. These memories inflamed
their imaginations, whilst their taste and understandings
were being daily developed by the study of the noble works
of art assembled in Paris, and by intercourse with Frederick
Schlegel, then resident at Paris, and who delivered private
lectures on philosophy and belles lettres to the three youths.
A deep interest thus awoke within them for this early and
almost forgotten school of painting—an interest which
deepened gradually into an absorbing passion, and became
the one object of their lives.
Returning to Cologne after a nine months’ sojourn in
Paris, and accompanied by Frederick Schlegel, they com-
menced an earnest quest after the old paintings which
lingered in their memories like dreams.
Great changes had of course taken place in Cologne upon
the suppression of the monasteries under Napoleon’s rule ■,
and the revolution occasioned among pictures was not the
least of the revolutions. Strange tidings reached the three
youths and Schlegel, of paintings used to patch dove-cotes
with ; of paintings turned into table-tops, and into screens;