Karl Friedrich Schinkel

Caroline Henriette Augustine Gabain, Berlin

Wilhelmine Kerll née Gabain, Berlin

Louise Jeanette Marie Quincke née Gabain, Berlin

Thence by descent in the Quincke family

Alfred von Wolzogen, Aus Schinkels Nachlass. Reisetagebücher, Briefe und Aphorismen, Vol. 2, 1862, p. 341, no. 29

Paul Ortwin Rave, Karl Friedrich Schinkel Lebenswerk. Berlin, Dritter Teil, Bauten für Wissenschaft, Verwaltung, Heer, Wohnbau und Denkmäler, Berlin, 1962, pp. 203-206

Helmut Börsch-Supan, Bild-Erfindungen, Munich and Berlin, 2007, pp. 441-42, catalogued and discussed, p. 146, pl. XXVIb, illustrated, no. 273

Heidelberg, Kurpfälzisches Museum (by 1981; on long-term loan from the Quinke-Stiftung)

Berlin, Orangerie des Schlosses Charlottenburg, Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Architektur, Malerei, Kunstgewerbe, March - September 1981, no. 196

Berlin, Kunstforum Berlin; Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo Kulturstiftung, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Geschichte und Poesie, 2012-13

This painting is unique in Schinkel’s oeuvre for depicting an unrealised building design in its intended environment. Normally Schinkel would execute such architectural plans more schematically as drawings or watercolours. Executed in 1820, it depicts the artist’s design for a new summer house for the Gabain family. The inclusion of the artist’s self portrait in the lower right foreground suggests that it was intended less as a hard sell than as a personal gift, almost certainly for its first owner Caroline Gabain, née Gropius (1769-1831), the wife of silk weaver George Gabain (1763-1826).

Indeed, George Gabain and Schinkel were close associates, the former supplying fabrics for Schinkel’s interiors, the latter designs for Gabain’s products. From 1805-09 Schinkel even lived with the Gabains in the Breite Strasse in Berlin. Caroline‘s brother was the theatre painter Wilhelm Gropius, for whom Schinkel drew his first perspectival sets. Gropius’s son Carl painted a view of the Gabains‘ existing country house on the Kirchplatz in Charlottenburg, which was to be replaced by Schinkel’s more classical design. In the event, however, the new house, was never built because the family instead opted to buy the Villa Mölter in the Tiergarten district.

Schinkel was one of the most brilliant and influential architects and designers of the nineteenth century, not only of his native Prussia where his great buildings still dominate Berlin, but throughout the world. This reputation tends to overshadow his equally important accomplishments in other art forms as well. His paintings of historical landscapes and his theatre sets and panoramas were key expressions of German Romanticism – and his earliest architecture, which was both Gothic and patriotic, also took up this theme. His architectural style soon changed, however, as he began to create grand Greek Revival buildings then in vogue and exemplified by Carl Gotthard Langhans’s Brandenburg Gate.

Appointed Geheimer Oberbaurat (senior councillor of the Prussian Building Commission) in 1815 following Napoleon’s defeat, Schinkel oversaw the transformation of Berlin into a capital befitting the then mightiest of the German kingdoms, and the city we know today. His most famous extant buildings are found in and around Berlin. These include the Neue Wache (1816-18); the Schauspielhaus (1819–1821) on the Gendarmemarkt, which replaced the earlier theatre that was destroyed by fire in 1817; and the Altes Museum on the Museumsinsel (1823–1830). During this period he also designed the buildings and furniture of the royal palaces in Berlin and in nearby Potsdam, devising classical garden and architectural complexes.