Eugen Felix Prosper Bracht Swiss/German, 1842-1921

Overview

In 1850, when Eugen Bracht was eight, his family moved to Darmstadt, a town just south of Frankfurt in Germany from his birthplace of Morges which was outside of Geneva. By the age of 17 Bracht had made the decision that his profession should be in the arts, and he entered the School of Art in Carlsruhe in 1859. From 1861 to 1864 he perfected his skills in Dusseldorf under the tutelage of Hans Fredrik Gude and then returned to Carlsruhe in 1875. By 1883 Bracht was skilled enough in his trade to replace Christian Wilberg as a professor at the Hochschule in Berlin. The following year Bracht was nominated as a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. He exhibited frequently in Berlin and Munich and won a medal in Berlin in 1881 and one in Munich in 1883. In 1909 Bracht exhibited a painting at the Exposition in Berlin.

The quality of Bracht's work places him among the more mature of the Orientalist painters. While many of the Orientalists went straight for the bizarre, the fantastic and overly picturesque, Bracht's paintings are more subtle in their treatment of Middle Eastern subject matter. In the nineteenth century the elements that made up an orientalist painting were often so standard that one scarcely had to leave Europe to produce salable images with a "genuine". Bracht did not have to include camels, hookahs, harem girls or bazaars to convey a sense of the exotic and foreign. 

Bracht became an avid painter of landscapes, painting in Switzerland, Germany and France. His works before the 1880's were landscapes and had a Barbizon quality. Later in his life Bracht's works became more impressionistic in brushwork with dark and brooding palettes, similar to the works of Caspar Friedrich.