//NINETEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING

Focusing on regional artists, it is dominated by the works of artists such as Henri Lebert, David Ortlieb and Michel Hertrich. The latter’s views of Colmar constitute an important iconographic record and reveal the artist’s predilection for faithfully reproducing nature in his miniatures. In the 1960s, a collection of prints, drawings and lithographs was given by the Société Schongauer to the Colmar municipal library, a portion of which were presented to the public in connection with an exhibition devoted to the history of the museum (2003).

Other major figures in Alsatian art are well represented in the collection, with a special emphasis on the work of the neo-classical painter Jean-Jacques Karpff, a student of David who was a favourite of Napoleon’s entourage, encompassing his paintings, grisaille miniatures and drawings. The painter Théophile Schuler, a native of Strasbourg trained in the ateliers of Drolling and Delaroche, had close ties with the romantic movement. Fascinated by the mystical reputation of the former Unterlinden convent, in 1862 he donated his monumental masterpiece The Chariot of Death to the museum, a work that is certainly one of the most interesting painted political manifestos in 19th-century French art. Another major figure of 19th-century painting in Alsace is Jean-Jacques Henner, a student of Charles Goutzwiller and the genre painter Drolling, who donated several of his major works to the museum quite early in his career, all fine examples of his art, influenced in equal measure by German primitives and Italian masters. Finally, the work of Auguste Bartholdi, another eminent figure of 19th-century Alsatian art, is presented through a grouping of sculptures or studies for sculptures, complementing the collections of the museum devoted entirely to the work of this artist, which is also located in Colmar.

The museum’s collection also embraces the world of industrial creation and the leading Colmar manufactures of the 19th century through the major artists Henri Lebert and Jean-Georges Hirn, both of whom were painters of flowers closely tied to the printed textile industry, but whose most significant works tell us as much about the history of still life painting as of the local region.

The Alsatian school is also represented by artists such as Gustave Brion and Camille Alfred Pabst, whose paintings evince a penchant for historical and sentimental romanticism, depicting life in an idealised Alsace. Lastly, as a final testament to Alsatian identity under the Annexation, art between 1900 and 1918 is represented through the works of the Cercle Saint Léonard, with Gustave Stoskopf, Charles Spindler and Hansi, among others.