Contributor: Alexander Knopf
Location: Freies Deutsches Hochstift / Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, Frankfurt/Main, Germany
Description: In October 1809, Bettine Brentano sent a long letter to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. With this letter, a remarkable etching was enclosed. The work, fashioned by Ludwig Emil Grimm (1790-1863), depicted Bettine herself, sitting on a chair with a voluminous book. A closer look reveals the title on the spine. It is Achim von Arnim’s Wintergarten, a collection of short stories published in 1809. Yet Bettine does not hold the book like a reader. With the folded hands pressing the book against her bosom, she seems to rock it like her own child. The whole composition is meant to display a link between the book or, respectively, its author and Bettine’s heart. In 1811, Bettine would become von Arnim’s wife. The portrait, however, was first sent to Goethe. The feelings suggested by the picture were not exactly the feelings that Bettine was harbouring in her chest.
Bettine’s romantic affair with Goethe began with a visit in Weimar in 1807and lasted, far beyond Goethe’s death, until Bettine’s own end. It took place as a persistent passio in distans. We know of only four encounters between them. From the very beginning, the absence of the beloved man was the precondition for Bettina’s love for him, leaving a space in her imagination in which her amorous feelings could find nourishment. At the same time, the permanent separation lends Bettine’s love a very specific character. It lived almost entirely on surrogates. The intimate conversation had to be replaced by letters (Bettine published the correspondance—held by the Morgan Library in New York—under the title Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde in 1835; the book established her reputation as a writer). The lack of the other’s response was, more than often, replaced by fantasies. And, not least, the bodies were replaced by images.
Grimm’s etching of Bettine is one of at least two portraits of herself which Bettine sent to Goethe. The other picture is a watercolour painting also fashioned by Grimm in 1807 or 1808. Yet another, a third picture, a copy of Albrecht Durer’s self-portrait from 1500 made by Friedrich Epp (ca 1780-1812) in 1808, plays a significant role. In a letter from the 16 June 1809, Bettine wrote to Goethe that she had rediscovered the beloved in the ‘language of his [i. e. Durer’s] character’. To keep company with this picture which, according to Bettine, stayed ‘on my room over the entire winter’ (von Arnim 2022, 722), was more valuable to her than seeing any living person.
The etching of Bettine is just one among many portraits of members of the Brentano family manufactured by Grimm. From very early on, the Brentanos––the siblings Clemens, Gunda (Kunigunde), Lulu (Ludovica), and Bettine––took an active interest in the fortunes of the becoming artist. They even paid a part of the expenses for his education at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Bettine had met Ludwig Emil for the first time at her sister’s place in Kassel. She had come across him in the house of his older, scholarly brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm who also lived in Kassel. There, she had been introduced by her brother Clemens Brentano. While preparing the publication of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805-08), Clemens maintained a close relationship with the Grimms. And it was he, who entrusted Ludwig Emil with the production of three copper plates for the third volume of the Folk Song collection.
In Munich, where Bettine had settled in 1808, her relationship with Ludwig Emil soon intensified. Grimm writes in his Memoirs that, apart from his teachers and fellow students at the academy, he spent most of his time with Bettine. In her apartment he was drawing and sketching while she was cooking chocolate on the old stove or reading excerpts from Goethe’s letters of which ‘she received at least a couple each week’ (Grimm 107). The etching of Bettine dates back to the late summer of 1809. Upon invitation of her sister Gunda and her brother-in-law Friedrich Carl von Savigny, she had moved from Munich to the small university town of Landshut where she often received visits from Grimm. It must have been on one of these occasions that Grimm portrayed her.
The picture that was sent to Goethe is quite peculiar. It does not seem very appropriate to serve as an agent which is meant to stand in for one’s own self before the beloved person. That’s probably why Bettine deemed it necessary to accompany the etching with some words of explanation. In a long letter from October 1809, she wrote that it was the first print, ‘therefore blurred and not very delicate’. Moreover, ‘the whole thing’ turned out to be ‘rather gloomy and, according to the judgment of others, too old’. In her face, ‘never so serious’ as here, Goethe would not find any similarity. However, she continued, the work did not seem to her ‘without any merit’, the more so as the artist worked, without any preliminary drawing, directly ‘on the copper’ (von Arnim 2022, 860–61).
As we know, the etching does not have this particular merit. Despite the fact that Grimm did indeed master this technique, the Landshut portrait was drawn at first (cf. Bunzel 32). But this was, according to others, not the only absent merit. Von Arnim felt repelled by the ugliness of the depiction. Clemens wrote in a letter to Görres: ‘He [i. e. Grimm] has brought out a black, old, sinful, highly pregnant, poisoned picture, that Bettine thinks is good, but that horrified us, horrified us in a way that we hide it and never again look at it, that, by the way, Goethe praised a lot’ (Brentano 245). Indeed, in his immediate response, Goethe wrote that the artist would probably not always be so successful as with the ‘interesting little Bettine’. She is sitting so ‘cozy and sincere’ (von Arnim 2022, 874) that one has to envy the book its place. There is no doubt that Goethe took good care to prevent the extinction of the fire in his young admirer’s heart.
Date: 1809
Creator: Ludwig Emil Grimm
Subject: Bettine Brentano
Object type: etching, drypoint on copper
Format: 24,2 x 19,7 cm
Media rights: Freies Deutsches Hochstift / Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
Publisher: Freies Deutsches Hochstift / Frankfurter Goethe-Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany
References
Arnim, Bettine von. Goethes Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde. Sämtliche Werke. Vol. 3. Ed. by Waldemar Oehlke. Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1920.
Arnim, Bettina von. Die junge Bettina. Briefwechsel 1796-1811. Kritische Gesamtausgabe mit Chronik und Stimmen der Umwelt. Ed. by Heinz Härtl and Ursula Härtl. Berlin et al.: De Gruyter, 2022 (all translations by A. K.)
Brentano, Clemens. Briefe 4 [1808-1812]. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe. Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe. Vol. XXXII. Ed. by Jürgen Behrens, Anne Bohnenkamp. Stuttgart et al.: Kohlhammer, 1996 (all translations by A. K.)
Bunzel, Wolfgang. “Die Welt umwälzen”. Bettine von Arnim geb. Brentano (1785-1859). Ed. by Freies Deutsches Hochstift / Frankfurter Goethe-Museum. Frankfurt/Main: Freies Deutsches Hochstift, 2009.
Grimm, Ludwig Emil. Lebenserinnerungen. Leipzig: Becher Verlag, 1911 (all translations by A. K.)