Today's Fredlines: February 1, 2009 Archive

Mendelssohn: cute kid, and multi-media artist

Posted at 10:51 AM on February 1, 2009 by Fred Child (6 Comments)

Mendelssohn at age 7:

Mendelssohn at age 12:

An oil painting by Carl Joseph Begas.
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In Mendelssohn's circle, drawing was part of daily life. Felix himself kept notebooks full of pencil and ink sketches. He did oil paintings and watercolors. This water color is from his trip to Italy in 1836.

That image is from the Mendelssohn Project, based in New York. More images from the Mendelssohn Project here. And I'll devote a blog later this week to the work of the Mendelssohn Project. They plan to release the first-ever complete collection of Mendelssohn's visual art as a coffee table book.

Here's an 1836 watercolor Mendelssohn did for his friend Henriette Grabau.

In the last year of his life, Mendelssohn and his family traveled in Switzerland, and he took his watercolors with him. Lucerne:

The state library of Berlin has published a book of the 13 watercolors Mendelssohn painted on that Switzerland trip in 1847. You can buy a copy from the Mendelssohn House in Leipzig here. Here's one more image from that 1847 trip.

The book isn't cheap...185 Euros.
You can see all 13 images here.

Check out the BBC's slick & entertaining Mendelssohn pages (in the style of a comic book), which include several more of Mendelssohn's sketches, musical and otherwise.

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