Tuesday 26 September 2017

Kornelie Gerland ?

Kornelie Gerland 
(b. probably Strassburg 1865) 
Painter in Dresden.
(Possible printmaker).  

My brilliant special Austrian correspondent ("korrespondierendes Mitglied") Hannelore, who to my great pleasure recently accepted this splendid and important position, did it again. But first she corrects me on using the right terminology: Kurrent is the proper name for old German script not Sütterlin. It developed and evolved from 500 years of cursive writing. Sütterlin was a more modern version developed in 1911 based on Kurrent. It was abolished by  the NSDAP in 1941.  



Hannelore found a suitable candidate for the unidentified Gerland/Garland print in before posting. An artist named Kornelie Gerland is not be found in any of the known Artists Lexicons (that I have at my disposal) nor in Dresslers Kunsthandbuch. Which makes Hannelore's research all the more special finding a needle in a haystack.    

  
Kornelie Gerland (said to be a painter in Dresden in just one to be trusted biographical mentioning /occasion) was the eldest daughter of Strassburg geology and physics professor, composer, language and ethnic researcher, author and pioneering earthquake expert Georg Gerland



This extraordinary man and his more than interesting career and his families biography will be part of my upcoming publication. I can reveal here Kornelie's younger, and only brother Heinrich Gerland (also a professor) was married to Eva Schott, eldest daughter of Jena glass expert, inventor and entrepreneur Otto Schott. 



Otto Schott was a successful and according to his recently restored Jena villa a  prosperous glass-industrialist fabricating special optical and astronomical products (lenses) which resulted in a spectacular increase in quality of microscopic and astronomical imaging. Today it is a multi billion dollar international company. He closely worked together with Carl Zeiss.   


Otto Schott acted as patron to London based and exiled from Britain beginning of WW-1 German painter-lithographer Georg Sauter (1866-1937). Schotts eldest daughter Eva and her husband had met Sauter visiting London becoming friends. Schotts portrait was made by his protegé Georg Sauter (l.) and by the great  Max Liebermann himself (r.).  



Georg Sauter had married British Lillian, sister of John, Galsworthy (above by Sauter) after meeting her in London National Gallery. George's  brother in law was the author of the famous "Forsyte Saga" and awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1932. The book was made into one of the first European TV series and extremely popular in the late 1960's.



Sauter was a successful painter heavily influenced by James Abbot McNeill-Whistler (1834-1903), but also creating a scandal winning a second prize in  the prestigious 1909 Carnegie exhibition (read here) with this declared "erotic" painting ("the Bridal Morn" below) of a young women getting dressed by her mother and sister for her wedding day. Hard to understand what the fuzz was actually about a century later. The evolution of the human brain at full......     
  

Coincidence or clue ?
Eva Gerland-Schott died 1976 aged 89 in Hamburg-Wedel while I found the Strassburg Cathedral print, created most probably by her sister-in-law Kornelie Gerland, just 10 km. away in a Hamburg antiquarian shop last weekend. 


  

Thank you Hannelore. All information and suggestions welcomed


All pictures borrowed freely from the Internet for friendly, educational and non commercial use only. 
                

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