The Bonds of Convention Loosened
Elisabeth Hudtwalcker (1752 – 1804)
“Senator Hudtwalcker, a beautiful, youthful figure, sits in her summer street attire on a gilded chair with green upholstery. She wears a straw hat with a drooping brim and a steel-blue satin ribbon, a white batiste dress gathered beneath the bust with a white satin bow; the blue silk cloak has slipped from her shoulders. The shadow of the hat brim falls across her forehead and eyes. A faint smile hovers around her delicate mouth. Yet we are drawn by the charming young face far less powerfully than by the virtuously rendered straw hat, in whose ribbon the light plays, and by the delicacy of her toilette.”
The portrait of Elisabeth Hudtwalcker, née Moller (1752–1804), painted by Jean Laurent Mosnier (1743–1808), could hardly be described better than Alfred Lichtwark has done here. Mosnier, born in Paris, received his training at the Académie de Saint-Luc in Paris and in 1776 was appointed court painter to Queen Marie Antoinette. In 1788 he was admitted as a member of the Académie Royale, but when the Revolution broke out in 1789, he was forced to flee to London, where he worked for around six years. As a result, he escaped witnessing the execution of his employers.
In 1798, Mosnier came to Hamburg, where he remained for four years. In 1802, Empress Elisabeth Alexeievna appointed him court painter, and he moved to St Petersburg. Reflecting the different stages of his career, the Louvre, the Hermitage and the Kunsthalle all hold paintings by Mosnier.
The Senator’s Wife with Elegance and Humour
The portrait of the senator’s wife captivates through the consummate elegance of the sitter and her natural, composed bearing. From beneath her shadowed eyes, she looks at the viewer with a hint of coquettishness, but there is a touch of humour there, too. The restriction to a few colours lends the composition a sense of calm and unity: the structure of the painting and its subject—the portrayal of a personality at peace with itself—correspond perfectly.
Elisabeth Hudtwalcker must have enjoyed a happy marriage; for when her husband, the merchant and senator Johann Michael Hudtwalcker (1747–1818), later wrote her biography, he had nothing but praise for her. “Betchen,” as he affectionately called her, was a genius and possessed the grace of a goddess. She learned Latin, English and French almost as a matter of course, committing entire passages from the works of Racine (1639–1699) to memory. She danced the minuet and had been drawing since early childhood.
Later, she received instruction in pastel and oil painting and produced miniatures of her aunts, uncles and nieces. After her marriage, she also portrayed her husband and her parents-in-law. Elisabeth Hudtwalcker was a perfect hostess and a devoted mother to her five children, who naturally became “victims” of her passion for painting as well.
The Hudtwalckers maintained a large household, where they entertained illustrious guests. They spent their happy summers, however, in a small rented garden near the Deichtor, which the architect Johann August Arens (1757–1806) laid out for them. Arens was also responsible for the design of their second, larger garden in Eppendorf.
Elisabeth Hudtwalcker would have liked to become a painter, but, as her husband put it in his biography, “she had higher duties.” Yet alongside her higher duties as a housewife, she received encouragement and inspiration to continue painting from such illustrious colleagues as Chodowiecki, Tischbein and Schadow. Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801) was a family friend who often came to visit and praised her work.
Well Acquainted with Painters and Men of Letters
During an educational journey to Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Braunschweig and Wolfenbüttel, the Hudtwalckers met Chodowiecki again in Berlin. They also visited the Prussian sculptor and painter Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850), who advised Mrs Hudtwalcker to draw with a silverpoint, as he himself liked to do.
Johann Michael Hudtwalcker also recorded a visit by Jean Laurent Mosnier to their home: “Mosnier came here, he painted her, and she owed much instruction to this great artist, who held her in high esteem and with whose worthy wife she became deeply attached. He was pleased to have her sit behind his chair while he worked, took great delight in her own work, and whenever he visited us in the evening, he was happy to converse with her.”
Elisabeth Hudtwalcker particularly enjoyed reading the early odes of her uncle Friedrich G. Klopstock (1724–1803); she appreciated the witty, ironic aphorisms of the writer Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and liked to immerse herself in the physiognomic fragments of the Swiss scholar Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801), in which he sought to understand the individual as part of a divine order of the world. Lavater was often a guest at the Hudtwalckers’ home.
Tischbein Was the Last Visitor
Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein (1751–1829), who painted Goethe in the Campagna, was the last visitor to see Elisabeth Hudtwalcker, an enlightened and educated woman who time and again succeeded in loosening the bonds of convention with brush and colour.
Jean Laurent Mosnier was a pleasant harbinger of the French period that was not to prove particularly pleasant for Hamburg.
Katharina Baark
Hamburger Abendblatt, 14 September 1987
Translated from the original German text published on this website in 2017.
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