Art, Music, and Humour in Theodor Mintrop’s Album for Minna

Abstract

This is the first book in English alone on the 19th Century German artist and friend of Robert and Clara Schumann, Theodor Mintrop (1814-1870). Although he began studying at an academy of art only at the age of 30, Mintrop was inspired at a young age by the art of Raphael (1483-1520) and was one of the favourite students of the Nazarene artist and Director of the Düsseldorf Academy of Art, Wilhelm von Schadow (1788-1862), who depicts him in the novella Der moderne Vasari of 1854 as the ideal artist “Theodor”. Because both the real and the fictional Theodor were discovered by another of Schadow’s students while he was working on his family’s farm, he was also dubbed the “rural Raphael”. While many of his paintings and sketches reflect the style and beauty of Raphael’s works, Theodor Mintrop also drew numerous sketches, in which the works of Raphael and other artists are interwoven with contemporary scenes, poetry, and musical references in humorous ways. It is above all in his sketches for his friends and relatives that Mintrop’s comic artistic in-jokes are to be found, and this is certainly the case with this rediscovered album of 72 pages of sketches for the amateur pianist Minna Bozi of 1855-1857. Theodor Mintrop’s album of sketches for Minna is reproduced here in full and in colour with thanks to the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen Abteilung Ostwestfalen-Lippe, Detmold and with notes on both the art and music referred to in them. Explanations of its sketches (based on those published in the German-language editions of the album of 2003 and 2020) show Mintrop to be both a rural and a comic Raphael, for whom the imitation and reinvention of another work could be a homage as well as a humorous modernisation.