[F. Mendelssohn Bartholdy]--S. Rösel. Collection of drawings and poems by Mendelssohn's drawing master

[Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix]--Samuel Rösel (1768-1843, Mendelssohn's drawing master)

Collection of 11 drawings and over 40 autograph poems and other documents

the drawings of landscape views in Austria, Switzerland and elsewhere, executed in ink and watercolour, ink and wash, and in pencil, on paper, the drawings loose in annotated and signed paper wrappers; the poems and other writings being mostly birthday tributes for Victoire Lichtenstein, née Hotho, Marie Lichtenstein, and her maternal grandfather; together with: 12 small engravings by W. Rabe of drawings by Rösel (Berlin, 1839), contained in an envelope addressed by Rösel to Hinrich Lichtenstein; and two envelopes addressed to Marie Lichtenstein, containing poems and a drawing by Rösel of Schloss Lichtenstein near Vienna

over 60 items in all, various sizes, many of the writings with pink watercolour borders, with a loose annotated wrapper summarizing the contents of the collection, in the hand of Ernst Rudorff, Berlin, Salzburg, Capri and elsewhere, 1803-1841, where indicated

A treasure trove of drawings and writings by the celebrated landscape artist Samuel Rösel. Although very well-known in his day, Rösel is perhaps rather unfairly best known today as Mendelssohn's drawing master (some of his talented pupil's efforts show astonishing similarities with Rösel's highly detailed, fastidious style: compare, for example, the treatment of the large tree in an 1824 drawing by Felix of the cloister ruins at Bad Doberan with some of the drawings in the present collection). 

The evidently earlier drawings in this collection were presented at later dates by Rösel to his friend the zoologist and explorer Hinrich Lichtenstein (1780-1857) and his daughter Marie (1817-1890), for both of whom autograph writings in this collection were also intended. According to Mendel Lichtenstein, Hinrich Lichtenstein was the last pupil of C. P. E. Bach in Hamburg. Marie Lichtenstein was a goddaughter of Carl Maria von Weber and godmother of the Berlin pianist and teacher Ernst Rudorff (1840-1916).

LITERATURE

P. Ward Jones, ed., Mendelssohn: an exhibition (Oxford, 1997), pp.14-16