and extended in the Munich school.
PETER HESS (1792-1871)--afterwards von Hess--was born at Dusseldorf and
accompanied his younger brother Heinrich Maria to Munich in 1806. Being
of an age to receive vivid impressions, he felt the stirring impulses of
the time and became a painter of skirmishes and battles. In 1813-1815 he
was allowed to join the staff of General Wrede, who commanded the
Bavarians in the military operations which led to the abdication of
Napoleon; and there he gained novel experiences of war and a taste for
extensive travel. In the course of years he successively visited
Austria, Switzerland and Italy. On Prince Otho's election to the Greek
throne King Louis sent Peter Hess to Athens to gather materials for
pictures of the war of liberation. The sketches which he then made were
placed, forty in number, in the Pinakothek, after being copied in wax on
a large scale (and little to the edification of German feeling) by
Nilsen, in the northern arcades of the Hofgarten at Munich. King Otho's
entrance into Nauplia was the subject of a large and crowded canvas now
in the Pinakothek, which Hess executed in person. From these, and from
battlepieces on a scale of great size in the Royal Palace, as well as
from military episodes executed for the czar Nicholas, and the battle of
Waterloo now in the Munich Gallery, we gather that Hess was a clever
painter of horses. His conception of subject was lifelike, and his
drawing invariably correct, but his style is not so congenial to modern
taste as that of the painters of touch. He finished almost too carefully
with thin medium and pointed tools; and on that account he lacked to a
certain extent the boldness of Horace Vernet, to whom he was not unaptly
compared. He died suddenly, full of honours, at Munich, in April 1871.
Several of his genre pictures, horse hunts, and brigand scenes may be
found in the gallery of Munich.
KARL HESS (1801-1874), the third son of Karl Christoph Hess, born at
Dusseldorf, was also taught by his father, who hoped that he would
obtain distinction as an engraver. Karl, however, after engraving one
plate after Adrian Ostade, turned to painting under the guidance of
Wagenbauer of Munich, and then studied under his elder brother Peter.
But historical composition proved to be as contrary to his taste as
engraving, and he gave himself exclusively at last to illustrations of
peasant life in the hill country of Bavaria. He became clever alike in
representing the people, the animals and the landscape of the Alps, and
with constant means of reference to nature in the neighbourhood of
Reichenhall, where he at last resided, he never produced anything that
was not impressed with the true stamp of a kindly realism. Some of his
pictures in the museum of Munich will serve as examples of his manner.
He died at Reichenhall on the 16th of November 1874.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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