Cornelius Krieghoff

(b Amsterdam, 19 June 1815; d Chicago, 8 March 1872). Canadian painter of Dutch birth. He learnt the rudiments of music and painting from his father and about 1830 attended the Akademie der Bildenden K?nste in D?sseldorf. He moved to America c. 1835 and enlisted in the US army. In New York he met Louise Gauthier, a French-Canadian, and settled in Montreal with her in 1840, working as a painter and a musician. In 1842-3 he had a studio in Rochester, NY; in the following year he studied in Paris, making copies in the Louvre. Returning to Canada in 1845, he painted portraits in Toronto, and from 1845 to 1853 he lived in Longueuil and then in Montreal, where he produced genre paintings, landscapes and portraits. He exhibited in Montreal and Toronto, and a series of lithographs were published after his drawings. However, he found it difficult to sell his work in Montreal and had to resort more or less completely to sign-painting for a living. About 1853, at the instigation of the auctioneer John Budden, Krieghoff settled in Quebec City. He lived there for 11 years, making several trips to Europe. During this period of intensive production, he achieved popularity and prosperity and painted his best-known pictures, which were scenes depicting the local townspeople and the North American Indians, and views of Quebec City and the surrounding region. About 1858 he made panoramic paintings of Canada for the Provincial Parliament buildings in Quebec. From 1864 to 1867 he lived in Paris and Munich, continuing to paint Canadian themes. He then seems to have joined his daughter in Chicago, returning in 1870 to Quebec, where Budden encouraged him to take up painting genre pictures and townscapes once again.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Cornelius Krieghoff (1815-1872) was a Dutch-born Canadian painter and the good-humored observer of life in and around Quebec City in the mid-19th century.

Cornelius Krieghoff was born in Amsterdam, the son of a German father and a Dutch mother. His boyhood was spent in Düsseldorf and Schweinfurt, and at an early age he and a friend made the tour of Europe, supporting themselves by painting and making music. In 1837 he sailed for New York and enlisted for service in the Army against the Seminole Indians in Florida. The sketches he made during that campaign and the canvases he painted from them for the War Department have since disappeared, but this first contact with Indians made a lasting impression on the artist.

About 1840 Krieghoff met Louise Gautier, a French-Canadian woman, in New York. After they married, they moved to Montreal. However, Krieghoff found Montreal a difficult place in which to sell his pictures of habitants and Caughnawaga Indians, and he had to turn his hand to sign painting.

His friend John Budden, a young auctioneer from Quebec City, persuaded Krieghoff to move to the old capital in 1853. Quickly he became one of a close-knit circle of friends and recorded on one canvas after another their high-spirited adventures as they hunted, tobogganed down the ice cone of the Montmorency Falls, or celebrated at the inn of J. B. Jolifou. A theme which he repeated many times was "bilking the toll," which records the mischievous custom of driving the sleigh at full speed past the gate without paying the toll collector. Other pictures depict aspects of habitant life, Indians shooting the rapids and hunting, landscapes, and still lifes. Krieghoff also made skillful copies of European paintings on a visit to London and Paris in 1854.

In the genre pictures especially, such as Merrymaking, the wealth of detail makes a valuable document of the period, and the lively action and vivid characterization of the individual figures create an entertaining narrative, to be read like the incidents in a novel. In this respect Krieghoff closely resembles 19th-century genre painters of the Düsseldorf school and their 17th-century Dutch and Flemish predecessors.

After 1864 Krieghoff seems to have lost much of his creative energy. About 1868 he joined his daughter Emily in Chicago. Krieghoff returned to Quebec only once after that, in 1871, and painted four or five good canvases under the inspiration of Budden. He died in Chicago.

Further Reading

The authoritative monograph on Krieghoff is Charles Marius Barbeau, Cornelius Krieghoff, Pioneer Painter of North America (1934), which contains a catalogue raisonné, now unfortunately out of date. Other new material appears in the general work J. Russell Harper, Painting in Canada (1966).

Additional Sources

Harper, J. Russell, Krieghoff, Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1979.

Cornelius Krieghoff
Cornelius Krieghoff photographed by M.O. Hammond before 1873.
Born	June 19, 1815 Amsterdam,Netherlands
Died	April 8, 1872 (aged 56) Chicago, Illinois
Field	Painting
Training	Michel Martin Drolling
Works	The Toll Gate, 1859

Cornelius David Krieghoff (June 19, 1815 – March 8, 1872) is probably the most popular Canadian painter of the 19th century. Krieghoff is most famous for his paintings of Canadian landscapes and Canadian life outdoors, particularly in the winter. He painted a number of variants of his most popular subject matter (e.g. Running the Toll).

Contents 1 Life and career 2 Gallery 3 References 4 External links 4.1 Works

Life and career

Krieghoff was born in Amsterdam. He was initially taught by his father and then entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Germany about 1830. He moved to New York in 1836, and enlisted in the United States Army in 1837. Igor was not as succesful and Cornelius. While in the army, he made sketches of the Second Seminole War from which he later produced oil paintings. He deserted the army on May 5, 1840. Later that year, together with his wife Émilie Gauthier, he moved to Montreal, where he participated in the Salon de la Societe des Artistes de Montreal. While in Montreal, he befriended the Mohawks living on the Kahnawake Indian Reservation and made many sketches of them from which he later produced oil paintings.

Krieghoff traveled to Paris in 1844, where he copied masterpieces at the Louvre under the direction of Michel Martin Drolling (1789-1851). The Krieghoffs returned to Montreal in 1846, and in 1847 he was invited to participate in the first exhibition of the Toronto Society of Arts. He and his family moved to Quebec City in 1853. He returned to Europe in 1854, visiting Italy and Germany. In 1855, he returned to Canada. The Great Quebec Fire of 1881 destroyed most of the sketches in his possession. He lived in Europe from 1863 to 1868 and then moved to Chicago to retire. He died in Chicago on March 8, 1872 at the age of 56 and is buried in Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.

The Art Gallery of Hamilton (Ontario, Canada), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Ontario, Canada), the Beaverbrook Art Gallery (Fredericton, Canada), the Brooklyn Museum (New York City), the Glenbow Museum (Calgary, Canada), the McCord Museum (Montreal, Canada), the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (Montreal, Canada), Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (Quebec, Canada), the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, Canada), the New York Public Library (New York City), and the Rockwell Museum of Western Art (Corning, New York), the Winnipeg Art Gallery (Winnipeg, Canada) are among the public collections holding work by Cornelius Krieghoff.

Gallery

The Blacksmith's Shop', oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 22 x 36 in, 1871, Art Gallery of Ontario	Self-portrait by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1855, National Gallery of Canada	The Toll Gate, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1859	Cheating The Toll Man, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1861, National Gallery of Canada.jpg The Toll Gate, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1861, National Gallery of Canada
The Blizzard, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1857, National Gallery of Canada	The Habitant Farm, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1856, National Gallery of Canada	The Ice Bridge at Longue-Pointe, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1847-1848, National Gallery of Canada	The River Road, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1855, National Gallery of Canada
Winter Landscape, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1849, National Gallery of Canada	Winter Landscape, Laval, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1862, National Gallery of Canada	Following the Moose, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, ca. 1860, 11 x 9.5 in., Brooklyn Museum	Fraser with Mr. Miller Up, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1854, National Gallery of Canada
Indian Wigwam in Lower Canada, lithograph with watercolor on wove paper	The Passing Storm, Saint-Ferréol, oil on canvas painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1854, National Gallery of Canada	Habitants, painting by Cornelius Krieghoff, 1852

References

• Barbeau, Charles Marius, Cornelius Krieghoff, Toronto, Ryerson Press, 1948.
• Barbeau, Charles Marius, Cornelius Krieghoff, Pioneer Painter of North America, Toronto, The Macmillian Company of Canada, ltd., 1934.
• Harper, J. Russell, Cornelius Krieghoff, The Habitant Farm, Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada, 1977.
• Harper, J. Russell, Krieghoff, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1979.
• Jouvancourt, Hugues de, Cornelius Krieghoff, Toronto, Musson Book Co., 1973.
• Krieghoff, Cornelius, Cornélius Krieghoff, 1815-1872, Québec, Ministère des affaires culturelles, 1971.
• Krieghoff, Cornelius and Marius Barbeau, Cornelius Krieghoff, Toronto Society for Art Publications, 1962.
• Krieghoff, Cornelius and Monsieur Winkworth, Exposition d'estampes en l'honneur de C. Krieghoff, 1815-1872, Montréal, McCord Museum, 1972.
• Reid, Dennis R., Ramsay Cook and François-Marc Gagnon, Krieghoff, Iimages of Canada, Vancouver, Douglas & McIntyre, 1999.
• Vézina, Raymond, Cornelius Krieghoff, peintre de mœurs, 1815-1872, Québec, Éditions du Pélican, 1972.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Cornelius Krieghoff

• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
• National Gallery of Canada
• Cornelius Krieghoff in ArtCyclopedia

Works

• French Canadian Habitants Playing at Cards (1848 ), lithograph with watercolour on wove paper
• The Sleigh Race on the St-Lawrence at Quebec (1852), oil on canvas
• Montmorency Falls (1853), oil on canvas
• The Habitant Farm (1856)
• Self-portrait (1855), oil on canvas
• Bilking the Toll (1860), oil on canvas

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