Buzási Enikő szerk.: In Europe' Princely Courts, Ádám Mányoki, Actors and venues of a portraitist's career (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2003/1)

Harald Marx: "THE LUCKY STAR OF PAINTING HAS RISEN" Painting and Art Patronage in Dresden under Augustus the Strong and Augustus III

Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini: Design for the wall and ceiling painting in the German Hall of the Dresden Zwinger. Sepia drawing with wash, 1724 Dresden, Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Sachsen Dresden earned fame as a royal residence. This statement both characterises the work of the painters and explains our interest in the clients whose expectations signalled the course of the court painters' activity. The personal fate and individual affinities, and character and culture of both the Saxon electors and their artistic advisers contributed to the development of painting in Dresden, its upswing or stagnation, for painting in no court was "free;" instead it was a series of precisely allotted tasks.

9 The targets of this investigation include not only the clients who commissioned the works, but also their advisers, who were well versed in questions of art, whether ministers or lower-ranking officials. Under John George II, Wolf Caspar von Klengel (1630-1691) was allegedly the art treasurer. Several of his trips to purchase works for the art treasury are known. Later he was adviser to Augustus the Strong, and it was he who instructed the monarch on architecture, acquainting him first with that of Italy and France. Klengel's purchases presumably had a formative influence on the heir apparent's taste. During Augustus II's reign it was count Christian August Wackerbarth (1662-1734) and baron Raymond Le Plat (c.1664-1742) who were influential in art matters. Wackerbarth was the patron of numerous artists, most of them architects and sculptors, rather than painters. His objections to the king's architectural ideas and Pöppelmann's designs are well known; Pöppelmann many times had to suffer Wackerbarth's resistance, which was usually based on practical considerations. As the archives reveal, Wackerbarth felt it his duty to enrich the royal gallery, but he himself collected, too. Raymond Le Plat, of Flemish origin, was in the employment of the Saxon elector and Polish king from 1697/98. He worked as an architect, saw to the artistic relations with Paris and signed, for instance, the contract of service with Louis de Silvestre. Hans Posse had the following to write about him: "This man [...] was the creator of the sculpture collection. The royal gallery is indebted to him for several hundred paintings. The king gave him free rein to invite foreign artists into SaxonPolish employment."

10 It was also Le Plat's duty to furnish the gallery rooms, hang up the pictures, and carry out the inventory. Any account of painting in Dresden must take his influence into account. It is less known that Count Jacob Heinrich von Flemming (1667-1728) was not only one of the most influential builders of Dresden, but also the patron of an important painter: Johann Alexander Thiele (1685-1752), his palace in Pirnaische Strasse housing more than twenty of Thiele's paintings. Born in Erfurt, Thiele was mainly a self-taught painter, but both Christoph Ludwig Agricola (1667-1719)

11 and Ádám Mányoki (1673-1757)

12 had an influence on him. He moved to Dresden around 1714/15 and received his first court commission in the early 1720s. After the death of his patron Jacob Heinrich von Flemming in 1728 he bid farewell to the electoral residence and entered the service of Günther, prince of Schwarzburg-Sonderhausen in Arnstadt. When his second patron, count Heinrich Brühl (1700-1763) was promoted to the post of the most influential minister in Augustus Ill's court, Thiele returned to Dresden and as court painter produced an imposing series of Saxon landscapes and vedutas. He