Page 178 - Beholding Liberty!

178 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!
II.1.17-20
PETER VON HESS accompanied in 1832-33, by order of Ludwig I of Bavaria, the young King Otto to Greece to produce paintings documenting the king’s arrival in the new kingdom. Between 1833 and 1839, von Hess worked on these subjects in Munich, where he also produced Greek genre paintings. Between 1840 and 1844, he produced pencil and charcoal drawings, and oil sketches, of scenes from the Greek War to be transferred to frescoes in the North Galleries of the Munich Palace by Christoph Nilson, using the encaustic process.
Hess had produced a number of portraits (from life) of famous figures of the Greek Revolution and folk costumes. For his representation of historical events, he relied on the two-volume edition of the first-hand account of the Greek War during 1821-27 by Thomas Gordon (History of the Greek Revolution, London 1832), in a German translation by Johann Wilhelm Zinkeisen (Geschichte Griechenlands, vols 3-4, Leipzig 1840), who extended the coverage to events up to 1835. Hess illustrated the events between 1821 and 1833, focusing, however, on the events of the 1821-22 period, when the Greeks scored their first major successes on the battlefield. The monumental display of these images in the Royal Palace of Munich was the result of Ludwig’s philhellenic sentiment.
Titled The Liberation of Greece, this series of 40 frescoes presented a major hero in action in each image. Unfor- tunately, the murals were destroyed by bombing during World War II. The charcoal on paper (86.5 × 65 cm each) drawings, however, survive, now in the Munich City Museum; some oil on cardboard drawings (15.5 × 11 cm each) also survive, now in the Wittelsbach Archive, Munich.
Peter von Hess’s images were published in lithographic form by Heinrich Kohler (1808-1885), accompanied by designs by Peter Herwegen (1814-1893), as early as about 1846-50, with detailed inscriptions in Greek, English, French and German. Their numerous reprints contributed to the dissemination and broad adoption of this imagery of the Greek Revolution.