Friedrich Muller

German, 1749 - 1825

BiographyBorn Kreuznach, 13 Jan 1749; died Rome, 23 April 1825.

German painter, engraver, draughtsman, poet and Playwright. From about 1765 he was taught by Daniel Hien (1724–73), court painter to Christian IV, Duke of Zweibrücken, with 17th-century Dutch painting as his model. Müller showed a talent for realistic depiction of animals, especially horses, and landscape, including farm scenes. The Duke gave him an allowance so that, from 1769, he was able to attend the Mannheim Akademie. Müller’s friendship there with Ferdinand Kobell and Franz Kobell (1749–1822) led to a considerable mutual influence in the work of all three. Müller also established himself as a poet at this time, becoming one of the representatives of the late 18th-century German literary movement known as Sturm und Drang. In the course of the 1770s Müller wrote a celebrated series of idylls, the lyric drama Niobe and the first parts of his Fausts Leben dramatisiert, all issued in editions with his own engraved illustrations. Life drawings and etchings from this period are in Mannheim (Städt. Reiss-Mus.), Frankfurt am Main (Goethemus.) and Monaco-Ville (Archvs Pal. Princier). At this time, however, Müller’s work as a poet and dramatist was more widely known and admired than his work as an artist. His study of the famous collection of casts of antique sculptures in the Antikensaal at Mannheim, and of paintings in the picture gallery belonging to the Elector Charles Theodore, directed Müller’s interest, however, towards antique art and the Italian painting of the Renaissance and Mannerist periods, and induced a longing to visit Rome. After he had been appointed Kabinettsmaler to the Elector in 1777, Müller was awarded a grant for travel to Italy. In August 1778 he travelled to Rome, where he was based for the rest of his life.

In Rome, Müller set to work with a zeal that seriously endangered his health. In 1779 he painted the Birth of Flora and the Triumph of Flora (both untraced). Other early Roman paintings were on the subject of the life of Moses; all are now untraced, except for a watercolour of Moses Drawing Water from the Rock (Weimar, Schlossmus.). Financial hardship stemming from the transfer of the Elector’s court from Mannheim to Munich, and later from the general political situation, kept Müller in Rome; soon he had to earn his living by acting as a guide for foreign visitors and from writing on art. Meanwhile, his own painting output steadily declined. Of his work of the 1780s almost all is untraced, although contemporary Roman reviews and Müller’s own descriptions record paintings of the Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1783/4), Alexander the Great and his Physician Philip (1784/5), Hercules and Omphale (1786) and Jason (1787). Of these mythological subjects only the painting Hymen (1799; Munich, Neue Pin. ), which had Amor as its counterpart, has survived. Both paintings had been bought by Lord Bristol, and, when his estate was auctioned in Rome in 1804, Müller bought them back and reworked them over a period of several years. His last great painting, Ulysses in the Underworld (1805–19), is also untraced. He also painted portraits. In Rome Müller embraced the classical ideals of Anton Raphael Mengs and Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Like his friends Joseph Anton Koch and Johann Christian Reinhart, Müller rejected the religious-cum-patriotic art of the Lukasbrüder, although he did discuss their ideas in some of his unpublished writings (Frankfurt am Main, Goethemus.). Both during and after his lifetime the drawings, etchings and paintings from Müller’s first, German period had been admired, while his work in Rome received only partial praise from his contemporaries and was soon forgotten after his death. Between 1805 and 1810 Müller worked as an agent for the future King Ludwig I of Bavaria, arranging the first purchase of antique Roman sculptures for the Glyptothek in Munich.

Ingrid Sattel Bernardini. "Müller, Friedrich." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T060225 (accessed April 27, 2012)

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