Exhibition Views 2015

October 24, 2015 - March 13, 2016, Kadriorg Art Museum 
In the cultural memory of Germany, Russia and the Baltic countries, the von Kügelgens are a renowned family with many members who were important artists, writers and intellectuals. The founders of this creative dynasty were the brothers Franz Gerhard (1772–1820) and Karl Ferdinand (1772–1832) von Kügelgen, identical twins who were born in the small town of Bacharach on the banks of the Rhine River in Germany. The brothers’ artistic careers started in the largest centres near their home, Koblenz and Bonn, were supplemented in Rome, the premier art metropolis of the 18th century, and blossomed on the outskirts of Europe, in Riga, Tallinn and St. Petersburg. Right from the start, one of the brothers was interested in people and the other in nature views. Gerhard von Kügelgen, who was later a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, is known in Germany as the painter of Goethe and as the friend of Caspar David Friedrich, and in Russia as the portraitist of Paul I’s family. Karl von Kügelgen has gone down in history as the artist who recorded the landscapes of Tsarist Russia’s new possessions: Estonia, Crimea and Finland. This exhibition focuses on the Kügelgen brothers’ ties to Estonia by presenting them as masters of major importance in Baltic art history. The Kügelgen brothers introduced the values of the Era of Enlightenment and a new artistic level to portraiture and landscape painting in Estonia and Livonia, and also raised the status of the artist’s profession generally, by seeing themselves not as artisans, but as belonging to the circle of free creators and intellectuals, and by entering into familial relationships with the Baltic nobility.

Exhibition curator: Kadi Polli
Exhibition design: Mari Kurismaa ja Mari Kaljuste