Bavarian Mountain Scene

Bavarian Mountain Scene has an impressive musical background by nature of its provenance (history of ownership). Formerly, it belonged to Herbert Witherspoon (1873–1935), a distinguished bass singer who performed at the New York Metropolitan Opera and was the general manager for a few months before dying suddenly from a heart attack in 1935. Previously he taught music history and served as president of the Chicago Musical College (now part of the Roosevelt University’s College of Performing Arts), and in 1930 assumed the role of manager of the Chicago Civic Opera. The next owner, Kathryrn G. Witwer (1903-1964), also of the music profession, likely met Witherspoon during her tenure as a soprano with the Chicago Civic Opera. She inherited the landscape from Witherspoon and hung the painting in her music studio on 721 North Michigan Avenue. In 1963, she received notice her building was slated for demolition in preparation of a nineteen-story skyscraper, which remains today. The painting next transferred to her brother, Samuel W. Witwer, an attorney in Kenilworth, Illinois and member of the Union League Club Chicago, who donated Steinike’s landscape to the Club. Kathryn died just a few months later, on September 2, lauded with impressive obituaries highlighting her distinguished operatic career.

The artist Johann Heinrich Ludolf Steinike hailed from northwest Germany, born in the small town of Bollinghausen and attended school in Hannover and Leer. Son of a bailiff, he studied art at the Berlin Academy and later in Cologne. His first attempts to establish himself as a painter in his native locale unsuccessful, he traveled to Norway and Rome around 1851 for further study, especially drawing and painting nature first-hand. In 1852, he took residence in Düsseldorf, and soon became a member of the prominent Künstlerverein Malkasten, the oldest society of artists in Germany, founded only four years earlier in 1848. He began to embark on yearly, long trips in search of ever-new inspirational geographic scenes for his large-format landscapes; fjords, meadows, and mountains became his hallmark, painted to a poetic and romantic tune. These works brought him fame, and his collectors were of the highest rank, among them princes.

The exact locale depicted in the Union League painting has been speculated as Bavaria or even Norway, where Steinike frequented. Rising craggy mountains, snow-covered in the distance, surround a lake populated by three villagers camping on the right. They have traveled by the small rowboat pulled up on the shore, perhaps coming from the distant church? Sunlit clouds bathe the serene landscape, lending a dreamy mood to the overall tranquil vista.