Friedrich Wilhelm SCHWINGE

(Hamburg 1852 - Hamburg 1913)

Landscape with Dunes

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Gouache.
Signed and dated Fr. Schwinge 1901 at the lower left.
376 x 697 mm. (14 3/4 x 27 5/8 in.)
The present sheet may depict the dunes on Schiermonnikoog, a small island which is one of the West Frisian Islands in the northern Netherlands, and which Friedrich Schwinge is known to have visited. Privately owned since the 17th century, the island was acquired in 1859 by a Dutchman, John Eric Banck, who planted marram grass on the island’s sand dunes to stabilize them. In 1878 Banck sold Schiermonnikoog to a German count, Hartwig Arthur von Bernstorff-Wehningen, in whose family it remained until just after the Second World War, when it was confiscated by the Dutch government, becoming an independent municipality in 1949. The island, which is sixteen kilometres in length by four in width, became an independent municipality in 1949 and is today the site of the first national park in the Netherlands.



Schwinge painted a view of its coastal sand dunes of Schiermonnikoog in 1898, while another painting of the interior of the island appeared at auction in Germany in 2009.







Friedrich Wilhelm Schwinge studied at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf between 1878 and 1884, first with Hugo Crola and Heinrich Lauenstein, and later in the studios of Peter Janssen and Eugen Dücker. In 1885 he settled in Hamburg, where he joined the local association of artists, the Hamburger Künstlerverein. The following year, the Kunstverein purchased a watercolour from the artist; the first of several acquisitions from his studio over the next few years. Active as a landscape and marine painter and draughtsman, Schwinge regularly exhibited his paintings, gouaches and watercolours at the Kunstverein between 1886 and 1910, sometimes in considerable numbers. In 1900, for example, he exhibited a total of twenty-two works, while the 1908 Kunstverein exhibition included thirteen pictures by Schwinge. These were mainly views of the countryside around Hamburg, as well as landscapes in the Lüneburg Heath, scenes on the river Elbe, as well as snow scenes and some marine subjects. The artist also produced a handful of landscapes of views in Holland, Norway, Sweden, Italy and Scotland.



Among his few public works are scenes of the forest of the Hamburger Walddörfer for the town hall of Hamburg, while in 1906 he received a commission from the Hamburg-South American Steamship Company for painted murals for the ship König Friedrich August. Works by Schwinge are today in the collections of the Altona Museum, the Kunsthalle and the Archäologisches Museum in Hamburg, as well as the Stadtisches Museum in Braunschweig and the Museum Lüneburg.

Friedrich Wilhelm SCHWINGE

Landscape with Dunes