Star of the Republic Museum Notes, Volume 10, Number 3, Spring 1986 Page: INSIDE BACK COVER
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"Castle Rock, Llano County, Texas,"
Circa 1889. Private Collection.ment position, and began to teach drawing at the German-
American Select School for Boys, a private academy admin-
istered by his son-in-law, Jacob Bickler. After the death of his
wife, and with his children grown and married, he began an
"extraordinary final artistic florescence" in the 1880's.
Hermann Lungkwitz transferred his academic training
and Romantic ideals to a frontier setting and "created a
striking genre of the wilderness" in his paintings. He used
trees, rocks, water, clouds, and even buildings in a symbolic
manner. Life's force and mortality were expressed through
the foliage and withered, twisted branches of trees. A half-
dead giant cypress in the Guadalupe River at Sisterdale sym-
bolized "earth-life," and trees conveyed an almost "humanoid
vitality."
Rocks represented Lungkwitz's most repeated com-
positional element, both in Germany and in Texas. The area
around Fredericksburg provided excellent opportunities for
painting boulders, rocky hills, and limestone bluffs; then there
was the awesome presence of Enchanted Rock. In his painting
"Falls of the Colorado, Austin," a lone hunter is overshadowed
by a massive boulder, expressing man's faith and unity with
nature. Rocks symbolized an acknowledgement of mankind's
mortality. The rocky canyon in "West Cave on the Pedernales"
suggests the "overwhelming solitude and power of nature."
Like his trees, rocks became surrogates for both human and
architectural forms, "lined with fissures and glowing rosy-pink
in the sun, or water-carved into drooping, grotesque faces."
Lungkwitz spent the last years of his life traveling
through the Hill Country; painting in a more spontaneous style,
his drawings reflected an "insistent staccato rhythm." His
works suggested nature's "relentless cycle of death, decay,and regeneration." His own death came in 1891 at the age of
78.
Hermann Lungkwitz's contemporaries conceded that
he was a gifted artist, but a critic also commented that his
paintings were "so obviously European in technique that they
seemed culturally homeless in the Texas of 1850." It was not
until the twentieth century that his works were discovered and
reinterpreted. In Painting in Texas, Pauline Pinckney suggested
that Lungkwitz's paintings were inspired by "imagination and
enthusiasm in a new environment, where he painted with
greater freshness and understanding. He had the gift of
conveying the quiet, rugged beauty of the countryside."
Lungkwitz was quite possibly the only European academy-
trained landscapist in Texas during the mid-nineteenth century.
Yet, he was hardly a cultural anomaly, but actually rather
typical of the German emigrants who settled in Texas. He was
one of many whose "German idealism" played a pivotal role
in the civilizing of the Texas frontier.
In celebration of the Texas Sesquicentennial, the Star
of the Republic Museum will open an exhibit of Hermann
Lungkwitz's paintings on March 2, 1986. Entitled "The
Golden Free Land: Frontier Texas Landscapes by Hermann
Lungkwitz," the exhibition is composed of eleven paintings
depicting images of the Hill Country and will be on display
through June 1, 1986.
Much of this article was excerptedfrom the thorough,
interdisciplinary study of Hermann Lungkwitz done by
James Patrick McGuire, Hermann Lungkwitz: Romantic
Landscapist on the Texas Frontier, and a review of
McGuire's book by Michael Ennis, "Light in the Hills." The
book is available in the Museum Gift Shop.
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Star of the Republic Museum (Washington, Tex.). Star of the Republic Museum Notes, Volume 10, Number 3, Spring 1986, periodical, Spring 1986; Washington, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth1623775/m1/3/: accessed July 4, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.