CHODOWIECKI, Daniel Nikolaus
Polish/German painter and engraver, son of a Polish grain merchant and a French Huguenot emigrant. He spent his entire adult life in Berlin, where he learnt first to become merchant, then studied art in Bernhard Rode’s workshop. He became a member and finally in 1797 director of the Academy of Art in Berlin.
He achieved his first popular success with the sentimental painting The Parting of Jean Calas From His Family (1767; Staatliche Museen, Berlin), which shows the influence of Greuze. He began engraving in 1758, and he is best known as an engraver. After engraving several subjects from the story of the Seven Years’ War, Chodowiecki produced the famous History of the Life of Jesus Christ. Many books were published in Prussia with plates or vignettes by Chodowiecki. His book illustrations include designs for Schiller’s Räuber, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield, and Shakespeare’s works. His portrait engravings were based mainly on paintings by his friend, the popular German painter, Anton Graff and Chodowiecki’s own sketches from the nature. His 2,000 etchings were a record of 18th-century life in comfortable interiors, observed with a kindly humour that lacked the bite of William Hogarth, with whom he was often compared despite his own disclaimers.
Despite working and living in Prussia, speaking German and French, and being married to a French, during whole lifetime Chodowiecki was thinking of himself as a Pole.
