Manila: Indisches Dorf auf den Philippinen [Indian village in the Philippines]

Description

original-colour chromolithograph, original mount on board. verso with title description label. Striking and highly detailed fine unusual original coloured lithographic view [no. 10] of Manila from ‘Die Reise um die Erde’, 1871-74.

Depicts indigenous dwellings built on stilts along the banks of a canal in Manila, Philippines. While the collection of 34 plates from this Around the World trip was published by Wagner, some pieces among the 34 (including Manila) mounts show a different publisher on the small verso label, namely Raimund Mitscher, Berlin. But this edition shows “R. Wagner, Berlin, Zimmerstr. 92/93.” and “Chromofacsimilirt nach der Aquarelle aus der Sammlung des Herrn Richard Goehde [Chromofacsimile after the watercolours from the collection of Mr. Richard Goehde]“. The colour of this litho is considerably darker than the Mitscher edition.

Eduard Hildebrandt (1818-1869) was a German painter and served as apprentice to his father, a house-painter at Danzig (Gdansk). Still in his teens, he came to Berlin, under the tutelage of Wilhelm Krause, a painter of sea pieces. Several early pieces exhibited after his death—a breakwater, dated 1838, ships in a breeze off Swinemünde (1840), and other canvases of this and the following year—show Hildebrandt to have been a careful student of nature, with inborn talents kept down by the conventionalisms of the formal school to which Krause belonged. By coincidence, he became acquainted with masterpieces of French art displayed at the Berlin Academy, and these awakened his curiosity and envy. He went to Paris, where, about 1842, he entered the atelier of Isabey and became the companion of Lepoittevin. In a short time he sent home pictures which might have been taken for copies from these artists. Gradually he mastered the mysteries of touch and the secrets of effect in which the French at this period excelled. He also acquired the necessary skill in painting figures, and returned to Germany, skilled in the rendering of many kinds of landscape forms. His pictures of French street life, done about 1843, while impressed with the stamp of the Paris school, reveal a spirit eager for novelty, quick at grasping, equally quick at rendering, momentary changes of tone and atmosphere. After 1843, Hildebrandt, under the influence of Humboldt, extended his travels, and in 1864–1865 he went round the world.. Hildebrandt died at Berlin on the 25th of October 1868.