Christian Morgenstern
1805–1867 · Free City of Hamburg · Realism, Landscape painting
The story
Today the name Christian Morgenstern belongs first of all to a poet, the author of the Gallows Songs of 1905. That poet, born in 1871, was the grandson of this painter, and in between came the painter's son Carl Ernst, a landscape painter as well.
The first Christian Morgenstern was born in Hamburg in 1805, the son of a miniature painter. As a boy he worked in the Hamburg workshop of the Suhr brothers, whose panoramas toured German cities, and in 1822 and 1823 he travelled to St Petersburg and Moscow. The decisive step came at the Copenhagen academy in 1827 and 1828, where he met the landscapes of the Norwegian painter Johan Christian Dahl and went on study trips through Scandinavia.
Around 1830 he settled in Munich, and he stayed. His friends there were the landscape painters Carl Rottmann and Eduard Schleich, and his summers went to the Zillertal in Tyrol, the moors around Dachau, the Chiemsee and Lake Starnberg. In 1860 he received the Bavarian Order of Saint Michael, and he died in Munich in 1867.
