Louis Coblitz
German, 1814-1863
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Louis Coblitz was a German painter and draughtsman.
His father's family originally came from St. Goar in the Middle Rhine Valley and moved to Mannheim at the beginning of the 18th century. Louis Coblitz was born as the son of the flour merchant Andreas Coblitz (1783-1851) and his wife Elisabeth, née Schadt, whose father came from Groß-Gerau.
The boy's artistic talent became apparent at an early age. He received instruction from the Mannheim-based court painter Theodor Leopold Weller (1802-1880). Under his guidance, Coblitz created his first portraits and genre paintings. In 1835, Weller provided him with a small scholarship from the Grand Duke of Baden, Leopold, to attend the Munich Art Academy, where he enrolled in November of that year and stayed for a year.
In 1837, Louis Coblitz returned to his home town and settled there at Quadrat R 3, 1. Here he worked primarily as a portraitist. He formed a special friendship with his older painter colleague and architect Jakob Friedrich Dyckerhoff (1774-1845), who was also one of the first German daguerreotypists and introduced Coblitz to this technique. In 1841 Coblitz went to Paris for further training, then to London in 1845, from where he returned to Mannheim in 1847. In 1856 he traveled to Italy. In 1861 and 1862, the painter stayed with his friend Gideon von Camuzi in Dirmstein (Palatinate). During these visits, he produced various landscape paintings - including of the English gardens there - including the regionally significant painting "View of Dirmstein in the Palatinate with von Camuzi's Castle".
At the end of 1861, Grand Duke Friedrich I gave the already ailing artist an apartment and studio space in the west wing of Mannheim Palace. He moved in with his two sisters and lived there until his death in April 1863. He died of a lung disease and was buried in the family grave in Mannheim's main cemetery, where a new memorial was erected for him in 1984.
Many of Louis Coblitz's portraits of high society in Mannheim at the time have been preserved, as well as landscapes, genre paintings and drawings.
