Johann Heinrich Ramberg
German, 1763 - 1840
German draughtsman, illustrator, caricaturist, painter and etcher. From 1781 to 1788 he studied with Benjamin West at the Royal Academy of Arts in London under the special protection of George III. Neglecting his study of history painting in favour of drawing and etching caricatures and satirical scenes, he keenly observed and satirized numerous types, as seen, for example, in an early watercolour, St James’s Park (c. 1788; Hannover, Niedersächs. Landesmus.). In 1788 he returned to Hannover via the southern Netherlands and in 1789 received his first major commission, the design of a theatre curtain (destr.) for the Theater Leineschloss in Hannover. After the curtain was finished that year, Ramberg’s reputation in Germany was well-established. Some alterations were made to the curtain when it was transferred in 1852 to the Opera House in Hannover, but the original design is preserved in an engraving by Ramberg (1828) and in sketches (London, BM and Berlin, Kupferstichkab.). A gouache study (1789; Hannover, Niedersächs. Landesmus.) gives an idea of what the composition looked like: the God Helios (or Apollo) rides in a chariot drawn by four horses and is accompanied by the muses of Tragedy and Comedy, all in a setting of clouds and antique architecture.
Soon after completing the curtain, Ramberg went on a study trip to Italy, visiting Dresden en route, where he met Goethe. He remained in Italy for two years, visiting Rome, Naples and cities in the north, and made drawings and watercolours of popular life (e.g. Coffee-house in Verona and Defeat of the Italian Singers; Hannover, Kestner-Mus.). In 1793 he returned to Hannover and was appointed Hof und Cabinetsmaler. During the years immediately after his return he painted some works in the academic style he had learnt in England, but, owing to a multitude of different influences, their quality is uneven. His major talents, however, were as a draughtsman and linear improviser. The themes of his drawings are indebted to the 18th-century English satiric tradition of Hogarth, James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson, but he developed his own style. His critique of society is not as vitriolic as Gillray’s nor as pedagogically moralizing as Hogarth’s; Ramberg tended rather to smile at human weaknesses. His own humorous idiom is particularly evident in Satirical Leaves (1805–7; Hannover, Kestner-Mus.), a folio volume of drawings. The Life of the Upstart Strunk (1825; Hannover, Kestner-Mus.), a later folio volume of 25 pen drawings, is characterized by easily understood and clearly drawn images with captions and occupies a place somewhere between Hogarth’s illustrations and, in the 19th century, Wilhelm Busch’s comic-strip-like picture stories.
Ramberg’s satiric cycles enjoyed little success. It was perhaps for this reason that after 1810 he devoted himself to illustrating such almanacs as Wilhelm Gottlieb Becker’s Taschenbuch zum geselligen Vergnügen. After the death of Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki in 1801 Ramberg became the most popular illustrator in Germany, producing drawings for the work of virtually every contemporary writer in the country. Closely linked to his illustrations were his narrative cycles, three of which appeared in book form: Reinecke Fuchs (Hannover, 1826), Tyll Eulenspiegel (Hannover, 1826) and Homers ‘Ilias’ seriös und komisch (Hannover, 1827/R 1865). He also wrote Anweisung zum Zeichnen der menschlichen Gestalt …, an instruction manual on how to draw the human form. In later years he was largely forgotten, his last major cycles having been completed in the 1820s.
"Ramberg, Johann Heinrich." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T070652 (accessed April 27, 2012).
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