Sabine Wieber

Eduard Grützner’s Munich Villa and the German Renaissance

Taylor and Francis Ltd RIHR_A_238254.sgm 10.1080/17496970701383654 Inte lectual History Review 749-6977 (pri t)/1749-6985 (online) Original Article 2 07 & Francis 0 0002007 S bineWiebe s.wieber@ bk.a .uk In 1884, Germany’s leading illustrated weekly magazine, the Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung, published an article on the genre painter Eduard Grützner’s recently completed residence in the Bavarian capital of Munich.1 Located on the upper banks of the river Isar and in close proximity to the Maximilianeum, Bavaria’s elite academic institution founded by King Maximilian II in 1852, Grützner’s villa was situated in one of Munich’s most fashionable new neighbourhoods, the so-called Gasteiganlagen. The article in the Leipziger Illustrirte Zeitung opens with a set of seven xylographic vignettes that presented the building’s historicist façade as well as six of its interior spaces – the central staircase’s landing, Grützner’s bedroom, the drinking parlour known as the Kneipzimmer, the painter’s studio, the chapel, and one of the living rooms (Fig. 1). The opulent nature of these interiors indicates Grützner’s elevated status in the socio-economic fabric of late nineteenth-century Munich’s art world. As one of Southern Germany’s leading genre painters of the day, Grützner (1846–1925) had acquired great wealth through the sale on the national and international markets of his very popular representations of peasantand monastic life such as his 1883 painting of The Card Players (Fig. 2). This commercial success enabled Grützner to satisfy his passion for collecting late Gothic and early Northern Renaissance antiques, many of which he brought back from regular trips to Southern Tyrol, where he owned a summer home and painted a lot of his genre scenes. During this time, Grützner was not the only academically trained Munich painter to turn to Southern Tyrol for artistic inspiration and many of his colleagues, most famously Franz von Defregger (1835–1921) and Mathias Schmid (1835–1923), also staged their scenes of rural life across the Tyrolean Mountains. While on location in Tyrol, Grützner came across the kinds of antiques he desired and he was often able to purchase items for less than their market value. Contrary to antique collecting practices of his day, which focused primarily on the acquisition of individual objects, Grützner was mostly interested in purchasing entire room ensembles, complete with historical floors, plafonds, structural beams, panelling, window frames, leaded glass panes, etc. Thus, when planning his new home in the Gasteiganlagen, Grützner asked the young Munich architect Leonhard Romeis (1854–1904) to design many of the villa’s interior spaces around the precise measurements of these previously collected ensembles.2