Recollection and Relocation in Gründerzeit Munich: Collective Memory and the Genre Paintings of Franz von Defregger

Dating from around the time of the 1914-18 war, the brief forty-one page memoir of the academic painter Franz von Defregger (1835-1921), now in the German National Museum in Nuremberg, reveals that like many more recent celebrities he found stardom a double-edged sword.1 The artist recalled that his fame was 'verhängnisvoll', calamitous or fatal, and so it has also proved for his posthumous artistic reputation.2 Defregger was internationally known in the late nineteenth century as one of Munich's Malerfürsten (painter-princes), producing genre paintings such as Sonntagsfrieden.