Friedrich Nerly the Elder

(Erfurt 1807-1878 Venice)

Piazza San Marco in Venice by Moonlight

Signed and dated bottom left: F. Nerly / 1849
Oil on canvas, dimensions: 64.5 x 88 cm

Friedrich Nerly (real name: Friedrich Nehrlich) was a German painter who became well known for his views of Venice. After his father’s early death, he was brought up by relatives in Hamburg who soon realised and willingly fostered his artistic talents. He received his first lessons in drawing from his uncle, Heinrich Joachim Herterich, who also took him on later as an apprentice in his lithography workshop. Young Nerly also kept company with the family of Johann Michael Speckter, Herterich’s partner. Speckter was a close friend of Philipp Otto Runge (likewise a pupil of Nerly’s uncle), through whom Nerly enjoyed access to salons where he soon made the acquaintanceship of Freiherr Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, the painter. In 1823, at the age of 16, Nerly become a pupil of Rumohr and was one of the latter’s most important pupils, in addition to Franz Theobald Horny. The credo of the aristocratic painter was “the perpetual study of real nature”. In summer 1827, Nerly accompanied Rumohr, his mentor, on an extensive journey to the Harz mountains, Weimar, Dresden and Munich and finally to Italy. In Weimar he made the acquaintanceship of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

At the end of 1828, he travelled on to Rome on his own, to settle there for a while. That year, inspired by Italy and Italian art, he changed his name to “Nerly”. In addition to Rumohr, the only other artistic influence he admitted to was that of Johann Christian Reinhart, whom he got to know in Romed. Until his departure from Rome in 1835, Nerly was the director of the “Cervaro Festival”, a costumed celebration at which newly arrived artists were welcomed by the Ponte Molle Society with humorous rites of initiation and received into the artistic community.
After a short journey through southern Italy in late October 1835, Nerly settled down as an artist in Venice, where he found the subject matter with which he become known worldwide. He painted no fewer than 36 versions of his “Piazetta by Moonlight”. In Venice, Nerly soon rose to become a member of the local art academy and married a woman from Venetian high society.
He died in Venice in October 1878, aged more than 70. In 1883, his nephew, the painter Eduard von Hagen, bequeathed Nerly’s entire artistic estate to the city of Erfurt, thus establishing the basis for the gallery of paintings in the regional capital’s Angermuseum.

References

• T. Gädeke, Schleswig Holsteinisches Landesmuseum, Angermuseum Erfurt, Friedrich Nerly und die Künstler um Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, cat. no. 13, p. 163, ill. p. 65 and title.