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VELIKOST

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VELIKE/MALE
STIL
Permanent Collection

1820–1870

Wilhelm Ternite

(Neustrelitz, 1786 – Potsdam, 1871)

Prussian Queen Louise in Dragoon Uniform
(1837 ?), oil, canvas, 76 x 76 cm
signed and dated lower left: W(?) T. r.. it. / 1837(?)

NG S 2128, National Gallery of Slovenia, Ljubljana

The waist-length portrait, contained in a tondo format, shows a young lady dressed in a spencer of a parade Dragoon uniform; she wears a decorative krakuska* cap and is set in front of a romantically tuned park. The polished facture suggests the Biedermeier period, and so do the hairstyle with fashionable spiral curls as well as vivid colours combined with dark hues. The signature is damaged and barely legible, the year can be read as 1837, possibly even 1857. 

The picture shows Louise (1776–1810) of the family of North-German Counts of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the queen consort of Prussia under king Frederick William III. She was outstandingly beautiful and belongs to the most frequently portrayed European noble ladies. There are also numerous posthumous images of her, including the one in the National Gallery of Slovenia, a work by painter Wilhelm Ternite (1786–1871). A portrait of 1810, likewise by Ternite, features her in an identical posture but wearing a spencer à la hussarde. Fashionable female riding habits of Regency period as well as later on were often modelled on military uniforms, but Louise’s Dragoon apparel also serves a documentary purpose, because in 1806 the King appointed her as honorary chief of the Prussian Army’s Dragoon Regiment No. 5. Among other items in the collection of the Queen’s clothes, also the spencer featuring in the present panting has been preserved. In addition, her death mask was also of great help to painters in the execution of her posthumous portraits.

The provenance of the portrait has not been identified yet, however it is possible that the painting arrived in Slovenia via family connections. Namely, Louise’s granddaughter of the same name, Louise of Mecklenburg-Schwerin (1824–1859), married in 1849 into the family of Princes of Windischgrätz and came to live in Carniola.

* Wladimierz Godlewski of Warsaw was kind enough to draw our attention to the name of the cap.



Preservation: Good, however the layer of paint near the signature melted at some time in the past due to heat or fire.
Restored: 1989, Kemal Selmanović.
Provenance: Unknown. After World War II in Brdo Castle near Kranj; entrusted to the Narodna galerija by the Government of Slovenia in 1986.

Biedermeier and Romanticism
Heavily censored public life between the Congress of Vienna and the Spring of Nations in 1848, weakened Church patronage, and the ascending middle class marked the era when life focused on the privacy of the family circle, individual dignity and the sense of belonging; this is expressed in the Central European art as the style of Biedermeier which coexisted with a Romantic view of nature. 

Portraiture was the genre of painting that saw its heyday in this era. Matevž Langus, Jožef Tominc, Mihael Stroj and Anton Karinger established themselves as individually formed portraitists who demonstrated their self-confidence as artists also through their self-portraits. The painters initially relied on formal characteristics of Neoclassicism. Stroj’s late portraits and particularly those by Karinger abandoned the Biedermeier manner and adopted a more realistic approach. 

Interest in landscape first appeared as the background of portraits; towards the mid-century first autonomous city vedute emerged. The Biedermaier landscape is idyllic, descriptive, and furnished with staffage figures. Painters were attracted by tourist destinations and locations that were related to homeland identity: Mt. Triglav, Lake Bohinj, Bled. Anton Karinger and Marko Pernhart established themselves as explicit landscapists. The latter became famous for his multi-part panoramas from mountain peaks. 

Still lifes became an attractive decoration of a middle-class home, and they also found favour with amateur women painters, one of whom was Countess Maria Auersperg Attems.