wonderful Austrian-French-Orientalist artist: Rudolf Ernst

Rudolph Ernst (1854-1932) was born to arch­itect Leo­pold Ernst, a man who enc­ou­r­aged his son’s interest in the arts. In 1869 dad sent Rudolf to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, where he himself had studied architecture in the 1820s. Rudolf’s dr­awing teacher was August Eisenmenger (1830-1907), a portraitist & mural painter famous for the Wiener Musik­verein ceiling panels.

In 1869, Ernst joined the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna at 16! In 1873, Ernst also began studying under Anselm Feuerbach (1829-80) at the Academy, an artist who had trav­el­led extensively and stud­ied at the Düsseldorf Academy. Plus he studied Gustav Wappers’ romantic style at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Wap­pers was influential on many of the next gener­at­ion of painters, espec­ial­ly Lawrence Alma-Taddema and Ford Maddox Brown. 

Ernst went to Rome to study classical and romantic land­sc­apes. Ernst left the Academy in 1874 to study Old Masters in Rome, and two years later, he moved to Paris. Both of Ernst’s parents had died during his years at the Ac­ademy, which must have made his decision to leave Austria easier.

 
1876 was a great year for a young art­ist to arrive in a city that was now the centre of avant-garde art. In Paris Ernst Frenchified his name, Rodolphe, and settled in Montparn­asse as both his home and studio. From 1877, he exhibited at the Salon of Fr­ench Art­ists every year, then opted for French nat­ionality, per­haps because of the increasing polit­ical tensions be­tween France and the Austrian Empire. [This was lucky; as a Fr­ench cit­izen, Ernst could remain in France during WWI while oth­ers had to leave]. In those early years in France, Ernst was exp­osed to Impress­ionism to academic art, from Barbizon painters to Realists.

Ludwig Deutsch (1855-1935) was another Viennese artist who arrived in Paris in 1878 to study with Carl Muller, genre painter special­is­ing in peasant scenes from Hungary, Italy and North Africa. Deu­t­­sch and Ernst met in Paris and remained close friends forever.

What caught Ernest’s attention was Orientalist art, peaking in the C19th and de­pict­ing the imagined repr­es­entation of the East by European artists. This movement blur­red the line bet­ween fantasy and reality, largely because the scenes were­n’t painted by locals. Ernst’s Orientalist era began in 1885 when he travelled to Spain, Morocco, Tunis and Turkey. There he was able to sketch and ph­oto­graph the lo­cals’ daily life so that these im­ages could later tr­ansformed into colourful canv­as­es and int­er­iors. The trip mark­ed a sig­nificant turning point for the artist; he was del­ight­ed to focus on colourful, exotic Orient­alism, espec­ially Islamic scenes eg the interiors of mosques and harem scenes.

 

Back at home Ernst used gen­uine Orientalist artefacts that he had gath­ered, to create out­standing fantasy eg tiles, lamps, pottery, silks, satins and kaftans. His C17th Persian blue-white pot app­eared in Per­fume Makers. The C19th Sy­r­ian bronze lamp near the Chieftain app­eared in After the Pr­ayer and The Wedding Day. The red-gold emb­roid­ered silk Dam­ask curt­ain was used in Smoking the Hookah, and the Moorish octagonal blue-green tiles were used in Reading the Koran. The C19th Syrian in­laid table near the Chief­tain was seen in The Refreshment. And the Alhambra-style back­gr­ound was a favourite set­ting that Ernst reprised: Wedding Day, Moorish Harem Guard and Alhambra.

 

Ernst successfully submitted Orientalist paintings to the Salon beginning in 1887, and in 1889, he received a bronze medal at the Exposition Un­iverselle. Winning a medal meant that his pro­­s­pects for a successful career increased, so he con­t­inued to exhibit at the Salon for another three decades. And like many artists, Ernst also op­ened his atelier to students, probably in the 1890s.

In 1890, Ernst and Deutsch travelled to Constant­inople and Cairo, recording what they saw with photos and through buying photographs from local stud­ios. Ernst also collected quite a num­ber of objects that he sent back to Paris; these later became the props and back­grounds of his art and were often rep­eated in different canvases. See Deutsch's handsome Nubian Guard, painted in 1895 .

By 1900, Ernst added yet another medium to his oeuvre: ceramics. Incl­uded in his faience pieces were the expect­ed Orient­al­ist imag­es and eventually he branched out into the pro­duction and sale of Orientalist tiles, inspired by the Isl­amic tiles he had seen. Ern­st moved just outside Paris to a vill­age c1900 and decor­ated his new home in the exotic Ottoman style.

The war years were grim and the art sales collapsed. It imp­r­oved after the Treaty of Versailles was finalised in 1919, and Ernst again showed his work at the Salon in 1920. His friend Deutsch had returned to France by then, and had also become a French citizen.

Ernst worked at his various forms of art in the 1920s, occas­ion­ally visiting his old Montparnasse haunts. As one of the first ar­t­ists to see the advantages of living in the left bank neighbour­hood, he enjoyed the young artists, musicians and writers moving into the area. Rodolphe Ernst died in Paris in 1932 at 78.