Ponte rotto

Karl August Lindemann-Frommel (August 19, 1819 in Markirch, Upper Alsace; † May 16, 1891 in Rome) was a landscape painter and lithographer. Lindemann was born in Alsace as the fourth child of the married couple Karl August Philipp Lindemann (1776-1828) and Catharina Philippina Frommel (1787-1841). His father, a factory owner, died when Lindemann was nine years old. Custody was entrusted to his uncle Carl Ludwig Frommel, a professor of painting and printmaking in Karlsruhe and director of the Grand Ducal Picture Galleries. Lindemann learned the artist's trade from Frommel, who later adopted him. His second influential teacher was Carl Rottmann. From 1844 to 1849 Lindemann traveled through Italy, which would later become his adopted country. In Rome he became a founding member of the Association of German Artists in 1845. He met Karl Christian Andreae, four years his junior, and inspired him to study Italian landscapes. He later lived in Munich and Paris, where he delved into oil painting. On November 25, 1851, he married Auguste Luise Karoline Freiin von Racknitz (1826-1876) in Heinsheim, Baden. In 1852 his son Manfred Lindemann-Frommel was born in Munich, who inherited his father's talent and profession and later became a naval painter, architect, and art professor. In 1856 Karl Lindemann-Frommel settled in Rome, where he was appointed professor at the Accademia di San Luca. He lived and worked in Rome until his death in 1891. A large number of Lindemann-Frommel's landscape drawings, lithographs, oil paintings and watercolors have been preserved. In the 19th century he was considered one of the best German landscape painters, certainly compared to an Oswald Achenbach. Lindemann's work, however, was never considered innovative or particularly influential, which is why he is almost forgotten today. The Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, 1908, describes his works, "As the fruit of his [...] studies [in Italy] he published a series of views of Rome, Naples, Florence, etc. in partially colored lithographs (Leipzig, 1851), which was followed in 1858 by lithographed sheets with motifs of the Pontine Marshes and 24 sheets of views of Potsdam." Since 2003 the painter's extensive holdings have been in the possession of the Martin von Wagner Museum of the University of Würzburg.