The German-Baltic Society donated two valuable portraits by Gustav Adolf Hippius to the Art Museum of Estonia
On Wednesday, 19 March two valuable portraits by the Baltic German artist Gustav Adolf Hippius (1792‒1856) arrived in Estonia. The portraits of the Hageri pastor David Friedrich Ignatius and his wife Magdalena Christina belonged to the German-Baltic Society (Deutsch-Baltische Gesellschaft, DBGes), which holds its meetings in the Reinhard-Zinkann-Haus in Darmstadt and preserves the cultural heritage of Baltic German families originally from Estonia and Latvia. Because Hippius’s paintings are of great cultural and art historical importance for Estonia, it was decided to donate them to the Art Museum of Estonia.
In recent years, the Art Museum of Estonia has been in contact with the German-Baltic Society in Darmstadt, proposing ways to preserve, restore and exhibit paintings in Estonia. “We are very grateful to the Baltic Germans in Germany who see the Art Museum of Estonia as a capable and professional partner that can be entrusted with the most valuable masterpieces. The portraits of the Hageri pastor and his wife, painted by Gustav Adolf Hippius, are important and striking works of art, filling a gap in the Estonian collections of Baltic German Art. They will be immediately included in exhibitions and reproduced in publications,” said Kadi Polli, a researcher of Baltic German art and the director of the Kumu Art Museum.
The portraits depict the Hageri pastor David Friedrich Ignatius, who had Estonian heritage, and his noble wife Magdalena Christina (née von Krusenstiern). The artist Gustav Adolf Hippius spent his youth in the Hageri parsonage, studying at the local boys’ school alongside the pastor’s son Otto Friedrich Ignatius, who also became an artist. Hippius was also the son-in-law of the couple depicted in the portraits because he married their eldest daughter.
David Friedrich and Magdalena Christina Ignatius have been portrayed repeatedly. The artist Carl Sigismund Walther, who taught art to the boys in Hageri, painted them alongside their children in 1813, creating the first group portrait in the history of Baltic German art.
The son-in-law, Gustav Adolf Hippius, portrayed the Ignatius couple somewhat later, during his Tallinn period in the 1850s. The Art Museum of Estonia already houses a posthumous portrait of the eldest son of the couple, Otto Friedrich Ignatius, who was a childhood friend and brother-in-law of Hippius and died at an early age. The portraits of Hippius’s mother-in-law and father-in-law, which arrived in Estonia from Darmstadt, obviously accompany the portrait of their son and therefore depict a moment from the 1820s showing David Friedrich and Magdalena Christina Ignatius when their son Otto Friedrich was still alive. A nice detail of the portrait of the pastor’s wife, Magdalena Ignatius, is a wooden swift, which was used to wind knitting yarn.