The Children of Martin Anton Heckscher: Johann Gustav Wilhelm Moritz (1797–1865), Carl Martin Adolph (1796–1850), and Leopold (born 1792)
Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein German
Not on view
Sons of the Hamburg banker Martin Anton Hecksher examine a plan of the Schnepfenthal school, founded in Gotha in 1787 and considered one of the most progressive in Germany. Tischbein was at the heart of German Romanticism’s rich intellectual culture, and he depicts the young students in a natural setting that was sympathetic to Enlightenment educational reforms that swept Europe and encouraged a new vision of childhood. Descended from a prominent Ashkenazi Jewish family, under the pressure of widespread anti-Semitism impacting business and social life, their father oversaw the boys’ conversion to Protestantism in 1808 before his own conversion in 1815.
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