Collecting Landscapes

With the opening of the magnificent building of the Nationalgalerie on March 22, 1876 on the Museum Island, Wagener's request for a "suitable location" for his over 40 years collected private collection is met. Behind Wagener's desire to make these works accessible to "artists and art lovers" is the idea of stimulating aesthetic as well as scientific engagement with the collection. After more than 150 years of further development of the collection, today's Nationalgalerie continues this basic idea in its endeavor to make both historical and contemporary art tangible. With the donation of his collection of paintings after his death 1861, the collector and patron of the arts Joachim Heinrich Wilhelm Wagener not only made a profound contribution towards the creation of the Nationalgalerie, but also bequeathed a body of works bearing remarkably broad witness to national and international developments in contemporary art. In Berlin around the middle of the 19th century, only the rival collection by Count Athanasius von Raczynski offered a comparable overview of current trends in painting. Wagener’s collection, however, was larger and more varied and adhered more closely to bourgeois tastes. While Raczynski preferred Nazarene art and idealized gural compositions, Wagener addressed himself primarily—alongside genre and history painting—to landscape. 

Wagener’s appreciation of landscape reflected a development in which the genre was re-evaluated and upgraded vis-à-vis history painting and established itself in a leading position on the basis of a new and modern understanding of nature. With the growing interest in nature since the end of the 18th century came a perception of landscape characterized by a previously unknown intensity. The landscape became a space for subjective experience and reflection, and in some cases a place of freedom. 

One of the pictures that Wagener was very anxious to obtain, and for which he had to wait a very long time, was Lessing’s "Sagittarius in the bottleneck", a mountainscape and a history painting at the same time. The collector commissioned the composition, dedicated to the Thirty Years’ War, as early as 1836, but would only take delivery of the  finished work 15 years later, in 1851. Wagener paid 4,000 thalers for the painting—the most he had ever spent on a painting. “A picture of enormous allure, one that
is generally admired,” wrote Friedrich Eggers in the Deutsches Kunstblatt art journal. “We are indebted for the exhibition of this painting to Consul Wagener, [...] whose collection, kindly opened to the public, probably none who pass through Berlin leave unvisited, and who selflessly shares the enjoyment of a magnificent art treasure with this entire stream of travellers and his fellow citizens.” 

Lessing has depicted a mountain pass which is being defended against soldiers by a group of riflemen on a rocky outcrop. “It is the concrete image of revolt,” as Eggers writes; “it is a scene that surely always has been and always will be seen where insurrection raises its lawless, cursed head.” The mountains as a place of freedom, as the topos of a national and patriotic consciousness, become in this work the stage on which rebels are fighting for freedom. In this “double” portrayal of freedom, Lessing once again lent expression to his anti-authoritarian stance. And Wagener, the “indefatigable and liberal patron of the arts”, probably sympathized with this attitude. Lessing’s "Sagittarius in the bottleneck" was to become “the loveliest pearl” in his collection.