Blumenvase

Title

Blumenvase

Description

Beautiful still life with flowers, fruit and a parrot, after the original oil painting by Nicola Casissa.

ca. 1870

Artist

Hanfstaengel (1804-1877)

Franz Seraph Hanfstaengl (1804- 1877) Munich was a German painter, lithographer and photographer. Franz Hanfstaengl came from a long-established farming family from Baiernrain near Tölz and in 1816, on the recommendation of the village school teacher, joined the drawing class at the holiday school run by Hermann Josef Mitterer in Munich. He was trained in lithography, had contact with Alois Senefelder and studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1819-25. He set up his own lithographic studio, which he ran until 1868 and to which he added an art print shop in 1853. In 1835-52, Hanfstaengl produced around 200 lithographic reproductions of masterpieces from the Dresden Picture Gallery and published them in a portfolio. The establishment he founded in 1833 continued to operate as an art publishing house under his name after his death until 1980. This business was professionalized from 1868 by Franz Hanfstaengl's son Edgar, who worked commercially and overseas. The writer Thomas Mann ironized his mass reproduction of art in his 1902 novella Gladius Dei by describing him and his “reproduction industry” as the “Blüthenzweig art dealership”. Hanfstaengl's grave is located in the Old Southern Cemetery in Munich.

Historical Description

Plant science, or botany, deals in detail with the diversity of the plant world and tries to bring it into a system. The plants are examined in terms of structure, growth, life cycle, reproduction, metabolism and chemical properties. Plant science is one of the oldest sciences: people have been studying the effects of certain plants since early on. What was of interest was whether these were edible or of a healing nature. Today, five sub-areas make up botany. Plant morphology studies plant structure and form. This includes the internal and external structure as well as the structure of the plant cell. Plant physiology examines functional processes such as metabolism. Plant systematics brings order to the plant world. It describes precisely the different types of plants. Geobotany deals with the location of the plants. This includes the interaction between the plant and its environment. Ecophysiology explores to what extent and why plants have adapted to their environment in the past. This is particularly interesting because this also happens in environments with hostile conditions.