With some 180 paintings by German artists, including such famous works as Schwind’s Morgenstunde, Böcklin’s Villa on the Sea and Lenbach’s Young Shepherd, the Sammlung Schack houses one of the most important collections of 19th-century German painting. It was founded by Adolf Friedrich von Schack (1815–1894) and has remained unaltered in its composition since his death. The Sammlung Schack is, as such, an important testimony to art collecting in Germany as well as being a unique museum to the Post-Romantic era that gives visitors an insight into the yearnings, dreams and the pictorial world of that period.

A poet and literary historian

Count Adolf Friedrich von Schack was born in Schwerin in the German principality of Mecklenburg in 1815. He began his career as a lawyer and diplomat in the local civil service, but relinquished his post in 1851 in order to devote himself entirely to literary interests. In 1856 Maximilian II of Bavaria invited him to Munich, where he joined the circle of scientists, scholars and writers the king had gathered there to make the city a centre of German intellectual life comparable to eighteenth-century Weimar. Schack numbered among his friends the celebrated poets Emanuel Geibel and Paul Heyse. After the death of Maximilian, in 1864, Schack’s ties with Munich became looser. He travelled widely during the last thirty years of his life, visiting Italy, Spain, Greece and the Middle East. He died in Rome in 1894.
Schack regarded his literary and critical work as his most important achievement. He wrote on the theatre in seventeenth-century Spain and on the Arabian culture of medieval Spain and southern Italy. He had a profound knowledge of Oriental literature and produced a German translation of Firdousī’s Shahnama (The Book of Kings), a major work of Persian poetry. In later years he focused increasingly on his own poetry, taking the subjects of his epic poems and plays from periods of transition and upheaval such as Late Antiquity, the Renaissance and the Reformation. His models were Byron and the German author August von Platen. In 1888 Schack published his autobiography, Ein halbes Jahrhundert (Half a Century), which describes his travels and his encounters with important figures of his time. Today, his poetry is almost completely forgotten, and he is remembered principally for his collection of paintings, amassed mostly in the 1860s and ’70s.

A collector and patron of the arts

Schack’s chief aim as an art collector was to promote the work of underrated and young, unknown artists. Among those he supported by means of regular purchases and commissions were Moritz von Schwind, whose idealistic approach had been relegated to the sidelines as a result of the triumphant progress of Realism, and the young painters Arnold Böcklin, Anselm Feuerbach and Hans von Marées, whom the contemporary art market disregarded. Although Schack was familiar with the French art of his day and greatly admired Eugène Delacroix, he deliberately acquired work only by German-speaking artists.
Schack’s paintings, the genres to which they belong and their subjects, reflect his own interests and predilections. His notion of art was fundamentally idealistic, and that automatically precluded all forms of Realism. ‘Poetry is the mother of all the arts,’ he wrote, ‘and both painters and musicians may be termed genuine artists only when they are imbued with the poetic spirit in the way that poets are.’ Most works in the collection are therefore history paintings or landscapes. With one or two exceptions, notably works by Spitzweg, the genre painting so popular in Schack’s day is absent.
The landscapes depict motifs from Mediterranean countries: Italy, Greece and especially Spain, which Schack visited on many occasions. Böcklin’s and Feuerbach’s paintings show not only the gods and myths of ancient Greece and Rome, but also subjects taken from the work of later poets, from Dante and Petrarch to Goethe. Schwind’s pictures evoke the sagas and legends of medieval Germany, which had been rediscovered in the late eighteenth century and invoked as an alternative to classical antiquity.
Along with work by his contemporaries, Schack collected copies of major sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings, notably of such Venetian artists as Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. Among the copyists was the young Franz von Lenbach, later to become Germany’s leading portrait painter.
Classical antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; Greece, Italy and the Spain of Romantic imagination: these eras, these places provided a focus for escapist longings, offering a refuge from the upheavals of the dawning modern age. The collection put together by the cosmopolitan Schack reflects this with compelling force. The paintings conjure up far-off times and realms as an expression of contemporary desires and hopes. In 1881 Schack published his thoughts on the works in his collection in a visitors’ guide titled Meine Gemäldesammlung (My Picture Collection).

The Sammlung Schack

Collection Schack was originally housed in his mansion in Brienner Strasse. It was opened to the public in 1865 and attracted a large number of visitors. The imposing building was dominated by a neo-Renaissance façade designed by Lorenz Gedon.
In 1876 Schack bequeathed his collection to the German emperor. Thus it became the property of Wilhelm II on Schack’s death in 1894. Wilhelm left the collection in Munich, and in 1909 erected the present gallery in Prinzregentenstrasse, together with a building next door for the Prussian embassy. The leading German sculptor of the day, Adolf von Hildebrand, produced the first designs for this architectural complex, which was built by Max Littmann.

Collection Schack is part  of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen (Bavarian State Picture Collections)  since 1939. On the occasion of the building’s centenary in 2009, the gallery was renovated and the collection re-hung. The rooms were repainted to a modern colour scheme. Selected poetical texts of the period on the walls allow the paintings – selected by the collector himself, as a writer and connoisseur of European cultural history – to be seen in a wider context. The new heart of the building is the room, created in 2009, in which masterfully executed copies of Venetian Renaissance painting are hung, completed for Count Schack by Franz von Lenbach, among others.

The building and the collection are described in a new catalogue, in which all works exhibited are illustrated in colour and described in full. (Hatje Cantz, 288 pages, fully illustrated. €19.80 in the museum).