German School Flower Wreath of Virtue & Humility with Sütterlin Script

German Romantic Friendship Pictures c.1810

This picture forms part of a charming small group of German works dating from around 1810. The pictures incorporate Romantic and Neoclassical themes and were produced by various hands as 'friendship pictures' for a young woman named Louise. Inscriptions accompanying the pictures suggest that she was possibly the artist Louise Purgold (1782–1848) of Gotha, who married the archaeologist and art historian Emil Braun (1809–1856).

Louise was the daughter of the Gotha court councillor Heinrich Christoph Rudolph Purgold (1748–1806) and sister of Carl Purgold (1778–1851), mayor of Gotha. Carl's wife had the maiden name Dürfeldt. The names Purgold and Dürfeldt, along with the locations Gotha, Altenburg and Eisenburg, recur throughout the collection's inscriptions.

At the Munich Academy Louise Purgold became a friend of the artist Maria Elektrine von Freyberg (1797–1847), whom Peter von Cornelius considered even more important than Angelica Kauffman.

Louise went on to mary Emil Braun, who spent most of his career in Rome, serving as the first Secretary of the German Archaeological Institute. Louise moved to Rome with Emil, where she set up a shop to do electroplating and sculptural work.

The charming paintings in this group show the popular influence of ancient Greece and Rome in German art at this time, combined with a Romantic sensibility—a connection with nature and appreciation of beauty.