Amalie Murtfeldt

Murtfeldt in 1860

Amalie Murtfeldt (22 March 1828 - 28 June 1888) was a German painter, especially of portraits.

Biography

Amalie Henriette Sophie Murtfeldt was born in Bremen, the youngest of two surviving siblings. Carl Friedrich Murtfeldt, her father, was a businessman. Her parents were conscious of living in a state declining prosperity: there was a concern that because of the family's poverty neither daughter would be able to marry "appropriately". Both girls, therefore, received "academic" educations that focused on their innate talents. Amalie's sister, Ida Murtfeldt, embarked on musical studies which led to her becoming a piano teacher, while Amalie Murtfeld underwent a thirty-month apprenticeship with the Bremen portrait artist Karl Kirchner. The outcome was that both the Murtfeldts' daughters reached adulthood with a sound practical education, a rare privilege among women in the middle part of the nineteenth century.

Armed with a glowing testimonial from Kirchner, in 1849 she was awarded a three-year bursary by the senate (Bremen government) which enabled her to be educated in the private Düsseldorf Arts Academy by Karl Ferdinand Sohn. She was the first female artist ever to receive a bursary from the senate. In 1852 she moved on to continue her studies in Berlin, where she started copying master-works in museums. These initial years were marked by very close contacts with the Kugler circle, which encompassed not just the Bremen artist Louise Kugler but also the poet-novelist Paul Heyse from Munich and the art critic Friedrich Eggers, originally from the north. Between 1855 and 1857 she was based in Paris, learning at the prestigious "atelier" of the "history" artist Thomas Couture and undertaking intensive studies on some of the works of the Louvre.

She returned to Bremen in 1857, and for almost ten years taught drawing at the girls' secondary school ("Höheren Töchterschule") of Meta Albers. She inspired a generation of schoolgirls, who loyally continued to back her up after she opened her first studio and launched herself as a freelance artist in Bremen. In the meanwhile, during 1868-1869, she traveled to Italy to continue her studies, with a particular focus on Rome. Setting up her own studio was made possible with generous support from several of the more prosperous Bremen merchant families, notably the Gildemeisters, the Nielsens and the Trevinarus family. The support of leading families clearly brought major benefits.

But there was also a downside, although the simple fact of a woman artist setting up her own studio in the city was, at the time, a sensation, Murtfeldt also found herself required to make compromises. In contrast to Paula Modersohn-Becker, who through the financial support of her husband was able, a few years later, to develop a very personal style as a freelance artist, Amalie Murtfeldt was dependent for her professional survival on commissions from the Bremen haute-bourgeoisie, whose artistic understanding was, in the view of several critics, severely arrested in the context of artistic developments in mid-nineteenth century Europe. There was a new wave, represented in Bremen by Arthur Fitger, that drew inspiration from classical, historical and mythological themes. In contrast, the Hanseatic merchant patriarchs preferred to take their queue from the old Dutch masters. Those traditions were consciously aloof from "luxurious, purposeless" art, and in Bremen found their outlet, above all, in portraiture. Bremen's business elite surrounded themselves with art that they could identify as "necessary". Amalie Murtfeldt exhibited three portrait as early as 1850, at a major art exhibition at the Bremen Art Museum ("Kunsthalle Bremen"), and her work featured regularly at subsequent exhibitions right up till 1874. Her artistic legacy is dominated by portraits for leading Bremen families, and she could not avoid an enforced adoption of the conservatism of the art mainstream in Bremen. The time and energy that she had to devote to commissioned portraits and teaching work inevitably restricted her own artistic creativity and ambition, leaving her activities as a pure and unconstrained artist to become something of a parallel secondary career.

In her middle years, she must have become aware that her artistic career had in some ways fallen short of the high hopes with which she had set out. She began to withdraw more and more from the public eye. Her friend and admirer, the well-regarded artist Arthur Fitger wrote that "Amalie Murtfeldt became ever more distant from the wider public in her final years, as her sensitive spirit became less keen than hitherto on exposing her art to the judgment of the general public. But for the few people who had the good fortune to be permitted access to her studio, for those chosen ones, who have the joy of owning one of her works and being able to encounter it afresh each day, came the appreciation of how far she had perfected her talents, restlessly striving with the passing years." Fitger delivered a telling appreciation of Murtfeldt's talents in a speech he gave at her funeral. He stressed the harmonious coming together of human and artistic qualities that she was able to bring to her work, thanks to her unusually sensitive personality. In 1889, approximately a year after her death, a commemorative exhibition of her works was presented at the city's Art Museum ("Kunsthalle Bremen") at Fitger's instigation. Her abundant portraiture was well represented, but there were also paintings of bathing nymphs, bacchantes, classical tambouristas and gypsey figures. The exhibition provided an excellent display of the various phases of a remarkably creative artistic career, and there was a revival of interest in her work among Bremen's art lovers.

Arthur The Nurbfitger was both a friend and an artist whose own stylist approach was close to Murfeldt's own. As regards the praise he lavished on her work he was far from alone among arts scholars and commentators of the time. Nevertheless, neither Fitzger nor Murfeldt transcended their own age, and their artistic vision had fallen out of fashion by the time of Fitger's own death in 1909.

Amalie Murtfeldt was forgotten by many. However, the affection for portraiture by members of Bremen's ruling class during the final decades of the nineteenth century means that her work has not entirely disappeared from view. Among contemporary (2019) scholars, Dr. Löhr of Bremen's Focke Museum (which includes in its collection two of her portraits, from 1860 and 1888), considers her work "competently crafted but not outstanding" ("handwerklich ordentlich, aber nicht überragend").