Lot 1307 | Clemens Bewer | Lorelei on the Rock

BEWER, CLEMENS
1820 Aachen - 1884 Bonn

Title: Lorelei on the Rock.
Date: 1867.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Mounting: Relined.
Measurement: 147 x 109cm.
Notation: Signed lower right: "C. Bewer 1867".
Frame: Framed.

Literature:
F.v. Boetticher: Malerwerke des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts. Dresden 1891-1901, vol. I.,1, p. 95, no. 10 (here with ownership details: Alwin Adam, Boston).

Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany, purchased from an American private collection.

Tragedy lies in her gaze. The young, unreal beauty is seated on a steep rock high above the water. The wind plays with her strawberry blonde hair, crowned with a diadem, and her golden-yellow robe. It is the hour of sunset glow, but stormy clouds are gathering, through which a glistening ray of sunlight hits the lonely figure on the rock. The white top has slipped over the shoulders of this beauty in a way that exposes her left breast. She holds an eleven-string lyre in her left hand. However, the gaze of the woman with the classical profile is not happy. It is directed inwards, appearing lost in reverie. There are shadows around her eyes, and her delicately chiseled mouth is serious. This 'Lore Lay', painted by the artist Clemens Bewer in 1867, is suffering from the role that was originally and created by poet Clemens Brentano in such a tragic fashion in 1801. Her beauty and her singing lead men to their doom, but she has lost the one she desires. Brentano's romantic personification of unfulfilled love quickly took on a life of its own and was transformed. It became a popular motif, not least through the poem by Heinrich Heine that was adapted as a song. Bewer's Lorelei has interrupted her ill-fated song, but her beauty remains her curse.

Born in Aachen, Carl Bewer initially trained at the Düsseldorf Academy under Carl Ferdinand Sohn from 1837 on. In 1841 he went to Paris, where he continued his studies under the leading history painter Paul Delaroche and the portraitist Ary Scheffer. When Bewer returned to Düsseldorf in 1847, he continued to study under Wilhelm von Schadow and was quickly integrated into the artistic community. Bewer became a member and later president of the artists' association Malkasten and the Düsseldorf artists' cooperative; in 1869 he was awarded the title of professor by the local academy. Clemens Bewer mainly painted subjects with literary, occasionally religious content, which he sold nationally and internationally on the developing art market. He was distinguished by the materiality of his depictions and his great talent as a colourist. From the 1870s on, Clemens Bewer also earned an excellent reputation as a portraitist.

Soon after its creation, the present painting found its way to the United States. Since the late 1840s, artists of the Düsseldorf School of Painting had maintained close relationships across the Atlantic, including a lively art trade. Within the United States, 'The Lorelei' probably changed hands several times; as a result, knowledge of her identity was also lost. Most recently, she was known as a 'muse with a lyre' in the US. In fact, the expressive woman on the rock painted by Clemens Bewer can be openly interpreted and admired by today's audience as an ancient mythological figure or as a modern and timeless fantasy figure.