Louise Kugler

Louise Kugler (10 October 1811 - 6 September 1884) was a German Painter.

Biography

Charlotte Louise Kugler was born into a leading commercial family in Stettin, at that time entering the sixth year of just over seven under French occupation. Her father, Johann Georg Emmanuel Kugler (1777-1843), was a prominent city businessman, councillor and consul. (He was also a part-time poet.) Both her father and her mother, a preacher's daughter born Sophie Dorothea Eleonora Sternberg (1781-1854), had a deep interest in the arts: writers, musicians and artists were frequent and welcome guests in the family home. She had at least two elder brothers, the younger of whom, Franz Theodor Kugler (1808-1858), would later achieve a level of eminence as an art historian and cultural administrator for the Prussian state. Both siblings received art lessons in Stettin which took them beyond the level of mere dabbling.

She subsequently moved with her brother to live in Berlin where Louise studied with Carl Begas who since 1826 had been a professor at the Prussian Academy of Arts. From whim she learned, in particular, the art of portraiture. Later her artistic focus switched to the (less potentially remunerative) subjects of flowers, illustrations and arabesque designs. Her brother, meanwhile, increasingly switched away from painting and towards the academic study of Art History, as a more secure means of obtaining a secure income. He obtained his doctorate in 1831. Franz Kugler's assessment of his sister's progress as an artist was cautious: "There is still something dilletantiste in this work, but it is certainly captures a lively sense of poetry and is executed with a strikingly fine sense of style in the way it uses colour and form".

When father died in 1843 Louise Kugler moved in to live with her mother, who by this time was also living in Berlin. Her brother Franz, who by now had a wife and children of his own, lived close by and was evidently seen as the head of the wider family. Franz had by now acquired an important government job in the arts sector and his Berlin home had become something of a literary salon, with Jakob Burckhardt, Theodor Fontane, Emmanuel Geibel, Paul Heyse and the painter Adolph Menzel among its members. Within this group of arts celebrities Louise Kugler sustained an independent position. She was forthright with her opinions, in the judgement of one commentator, "not a muse ... but in search of her own muses", the first to know about new work from leading poets and new areas of research picked out by historians, always happy to listen to and criticise constructively new pieces of work ahead of publication. There also survives from this period an album of portraits that she painted.

Her "Morgenländische Mythus" dates from 1847 (though it was published only in 1866): it consists of 15 pages of poems and illustrations, based on "oriental themes" provided by her friend, the newly fashionable poet-playwright Emanuel Geibel.