Heinrich Reifferscheid

An Shelley - Etching by Heinrich Reifferscheid - Early 20th Century

Early 20th Century

The German artist Heinrich Reifferscheid was born in Breslau in 1872 and studied in Berlin under Ernest Hancke and in Munich under Peter Halm and Albert Lang. Reifferscheid attended the Royal High School in Bonn; later he studied art history at the University of Bonn and architecture at the Technical University in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After he had started his artistic training at the State Art Academy in Berlin, he moved to the Art Academy in Munich in 1892 because he was able to specialize in landscape painting. His teachers there included Gabriel Hackl, Peter Halm, Emil Lugo and Albert Lang. In Munich, Reifferscheid made friends with the painters Hans Thoma and Edmund Steppes and the art historian Joseph August Beringer. In between, Heinrich was always drawn back to his beloved Rhineland, his artistic home. His first works show views of his home environment. Created with the finest tools, whether needle, pen or brush, the smallest details were just as important to him as the moods that characterize him in his environment. These moods particularly surround the portraits of the personalities that Reifferscheid portrayed. Study trips took him from 1894–96 to the Swabian Jura and the Danube Valley. He became a member of the Berlin Secession founded in 1898 and, together with Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Walter Leistikow, Max Liebermann, Max Slevogt and Anders Zorn formed. Reifferscheid also had contact with Hans Thoma, Edmund Steppes and Joseph August Beringer. Heinrich won first prize in front of Karl Hofer, Marie Stein and Martha Cunz in the competition for original etchings published by EA Seemann in 1903. The results of the competition were published in the Art Chronicle from 1903–04. In his last years, Reifferscheid artistically dealt mainly with the Rhine and Rhineland themes. At that time he lived in his house in the vineyard in Niederdollendorf, which today belongs to Königswinter. The Königswinterer Straße, where his house stood, was later renamed Bergstrasse. A memorial stone in front of this house, which Reifferscheid's son Gerhard had built, is reminiscent of the painter. Reifferscheid was a member of the German Association of Artists.