Ernst Friedrich August Rietschel (born 15 December 1804 in Pulsnitz, died February 21, 1861 in Dresden) was one of the most important German sculptors of Late Classicism. The sculptures he created, such as the Goethe-Schiller monument in Weimar or the Lessing monument in Brunswick, have decisively influenced the image of Germany as a country of poets and thinkers.
Rietschel’s style was very varied; he produced works imbued with much religious feeling, and to some extent he occupied the same place as a sculptor that Overbeck did in painting. Other important works by him were purely classical in style. He was specially famed for his portrait figures of eminent men, treated with much idealism and dramatic vigour; among the latter class his chief works were colossal statues of Goethe and Schiller for the a monument in Weimar, of Weber for Dresden and of Lessing for Braunschweig cast by Georg Howaldt. He also designed the memorial statue of Luther for Worms, but died before he could carry it out.
The principal among Rietschel’s religious pieces of sculpture are the well-known Christ-Angel, and a life-sized Piet, executed for the king of Prussia. He also worked a great deal in rilievo, and produced many graceful pieces, especially a fine series of bas-reliefs representing “Night and Morning,” “Noon and Twilight,” designed with much poetical feeling and imagination.
Ernst Rietschel was born as the third child of the Beutler Friedrich Ehregott Rietschel and his wife Caroline in Pulsnitz (Saxony). After first drawing lessons and abolished business studies in his hometown, he began his studies at the Royal Saxon Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden in 1820. In the following years he had first smaller successes and awards with drawings; The young artist, who had studied in the studio with Franz Pettrich from 1823 onwards, was drawn to attention. It was here that he commissioned the Gräflich Einsiedel Iron Works Lauchhammer to work on his first independent work, a figure of the Neptune Sea God for the market fountain in Nordhausen.
The Count von Einsiedel gave Rietschel 1826 the relocation to Berlin in the studio of Christian Daniel Rauch. As early as 1827 he succeeded in obtaining a scholarship from Rome, which he, however, initially postponed to work on various monument projects in Rauch’s studio. In 1828 he took part as a representative of his workshop at the foundation stone of the statue of Dürer in Nuremberg. On his return home he visited the aging Goethe in Weimar. A second visit together with Rauch followed in 1829. In August 1830, Rietschel began his journey to Italy. A year later he received a commission for a monument to the late Saxon king Friedrich August in Dresden.
In 1832 he married Albertine Trautscholdt, with whom he had been engaged for a year. In the same year – not even 28 years old – he received the professorship for sculpture at the Dresden Art Academy. In 1833 his first daughter Adelheid was born. Only three weeks old, his second daughter, Johanna, died in April 1835; In July of that same year his wife Albertine died. Nevertheless, his creative work remained unbraked.
In collaboration with many important architects, among others Gottfried Semper, he was responsible for the building jewelery of many buildings, especially in Dresden. At the beginning of 1836 he was appointed a regular member of the Berlin Academy of Arts, and only a few weeks later he became an honorary member of the Kunstakademie in Vienna.
In the following years, he received many important assignments, some of which he worked on for several years.
Through the design of works such as the Lessing Monument in Braunschweig (1854) (and many others), Rietschel became known as the most important monument artist of his time beyond the borders of the German Confederation.
In November 1836 he married his second wife, Charlotte Carus, a daughter of Carl Gustav Carus, who on 28 August 1837 bore son Wolfgang. Already in May 1838 he had to take another fatal blow: his second wife also died. Just as after the death of his first wife, he modeled her portraits of his portraits.
On 2 May 1841 he married Marie Hand (* 26 May 1819, † 18 July 1847). On the 10th of May of the following year his second son, Christian Georg, was born. In 1845, his daughter Margarethe Charlotte followed. Margaret was not to be a year old. In 1847 the son Hermann Immanuel was born. Maria Hand died after six years of marriage a few months after the birth of her son Hermann on 18 July 1847. On 30 April 1851 Ernst Rietschel married one last time. His fourth wife, Frederick Oppermann, survived him for almost 40 years. In the winter months of 1851-52 Rietschel traveled to Italy and Sicily to cure his lungs. On July 4, 1853, his fourth wife, Friederike, once again gave birth to a daughter named Gertrud Charlotte Marie.
In 1855 he took part in the Parisian art exhibition with a statue of Lessing. In the same year, he was awarded the Grand Ehrenmedaille and was appointed Knight of the French Honorary Legion. In 1856 the Stockholm Academy appointed him an honorary member.
In 1857 he again visited his master Christian Daniel Rauch in Berlin. In the same year, on September 4, his Goethe and Schiller monument was unveiled in Weimar.
In 1858/1859 Rietschel received the order for the Reformation monument in Worms. One of his most important creations is the Luther monument. He became an honorary member in other academies and institutes (Paris, Brussels, Copenhagen, Rome, Antwerp). He was also admitted to the Prussian Order Pour le Merite for Science and Arts on May 31, 1858. He finally succumbed to his longtime lung disease on February 21, 1861. Three days later he was buried at the Trinitatis cemetery in Dresden.
A large part of the extensive estate of Rietschel was presented between 1869 and 1889 at the Palais im Großen Garten in the then Rietschel Museum. Since 1889, he has been in the possession of the Dresden sculpture collection in the Albertinum on the Brühl Terrace and is exhibited there in part. Parts of the personal estate are in the descendants (drawings, sketches, diaries and letters in the Rietschel Archive, Remscheid).
In 1963, his great-grandson, the writer and graphic artist Christian Rietschel, recalled his memories of my life.
The descendants of Ernst Rietschel are today very numerous. Above all the two sons from the third marriage of Ernst Rietschel with Maria Hand, Georg Rietschel and Hermann Rietschel witnessed numerous descendants (including Christian Rietschel, Hans Rietschel and Wigand von Salmuth). Today the successors of Ernst Rietschel meet at irregular intervals to celebrate the birth and death of the artist, thus reminding the life and work of the ancestor.