Adolf von Hildebrand

Life

Hildebrand was born at Marburg, the son of Marburg economics professor Bruno Hildebrand. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, with Kaspar von Zumbusch at the Munich Academy and with Rudolf Siemering in Berlin. From 1873 he lived in Florence in San Francesco, a secularized sixteenth-century monastery. In 1877 he married Irene Schäuffelen.

A friend of Hans von Marées, he designed the architectural setting for the painter's murals in the library of the German Marine Zoological Institute at Naples (1873). He spent a significant amount of time in Munich after 1889, executing a monumental fountain there, the Wittelsbacher Brunnen. He is known for five monumental urban fountains.

Hildebrand worked in a Neo-classical tradition, and set out his artistic theories in his book Das Problem der Form in der Bildenden Kunst ("The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture"), published in 1893.

He was ennobled by the King of Bavaria in 1904. He was the father of the painter Eva, Elizabeth, sculptor Irene Georgii-Hildebrand, Sylvie, Bertele, and Catholic theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand.

He died in Munich in 1921.

Critical opinion

In 1917, the American sculptor, conservative critic and author Lorado Taft, while bemoaning the direction the German sculpture was moving in, described Hildebrand as:

a master of the old school and Florentine tradition, whose example has been a constant gospel of good taste and sanity. Even today, when the whole world has gone after false gods, his influence continues to be felt and I wonder if the fact that in the midst of this revolution German sculpture, however fantastic, remains essentially sculpture, is not due largely to the life long precept and practice of this admirable representative of the craft.