About Soehnée:
Portrait of Soehnée by Pierre-Louis de Laval
"Between May 1818 and May 1819, Charles-Frédéric Soehnée filled three albums with an extraordinary series of watercolour paintings and sketches. These, together with a single lithograph, 'as far as we know, […] make up the bulk, if not the entirety of Soehnée 's œuvre .'
Soehnée had been born in 1789 in the Rhineland town of Landau, which at that time was part of France: his odd-looking surname is the Gallicized equivalent of
Söhne .
His family moved to Paris before the turn of the nineteenth century.
From about 1810, Soehnée was a pupil of the Neoclassical painter and illustrator Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson. The best likeness we have of him is that painted by his friend and fellow-pupil Pierre-Louis de Laval (or Delaval ), in 1812.
Excepting a few conventional landscapes, Soehnée's paintings are almost entirely devoted to fantastical and grotesque subjects: groups of faceless figures are juxtaposed with variously ratlike and batlike creatures, or skeletal birds; and there is a strange preponderance of stilts, whips and fishing-rods.
The titles that Soehnée gave to some of his pictures are further suggestive of a 'gothic' sensibility: 'Journey to Hell;' 'Cradle of Death;' 'A Place of Silence;' and 'The Winds, Grouped around Plague and Death, Cover the Earth with Tombs…'
At the time these works were executed, it is likely that Soehnee was already engaged in research that would culminate, in 1822, with the publication of a technical treatise in which he disputed the traditional account of Van Eyck's having invented oil-painting, arguing instead 'for the existence, since antiquity, of a form of oil painting, or a mixture of encaustic and varnish, which in his view, could be the only explanation for the durability and preservation of ancient paintings.'
Thereafter, Soehnée seems to have abandoned art, and to have 'become a technician, and a dealer; [and] not content with theorising, he perfected a varnish which was extremely successful—Delacroix mentions it several times in his journal—and which is still in use today.'
The present images were lifted from
Patrick Mauriès' catalogue
Charles-Frédéric Soehnée (1789-1878): Un voyage en Enfer which was published by Le Promeneur in association with the Galerie Jean-Marie Le Fell, to coincide with an exhibition...
Mauriès' article
Soehnée's Capriccios: The Paradox in Art, (translated into English by Judith Landry), which appeared in issue 17 of
FMR magazine, was my source for the information quoted and paraphrased above."
Text source: Giornale Nuovo
