Josef Engelhart, ‘The promenade along the banks of Lake Wörthersee’, 1900 (via artnet.com)
In one of my recent posts about Christl Engelhart, the first wife of Theodor Kern, I mentioned that, following the couple’s separation and divorce, Christl spent a number of years managing the Engelhart family villa on Lake Wörthersee in southern Austria, as a hotel. I’ve since located the villa on Google Maps: it’s at the junction of Seeweg and Dorfstraße in Sekirn, on the southern shore of the lake. Street View makes it possible (virtually) to walk up the road to the villa and take a look around:
According to one source, it was here that Christl’s father, the painter and sculptor Josef Engelhart, ‘gathered other artists and intellectuals around him’. I wonder if their visitors included Gustav Mahler, who had a villa, complete with composing hut, a few miles along the lakeside at Maiernigg, where he worked on his fourth and eighth symphonies? As I noted in another recent post, Mahler had been a frequent guest at the Vienna home of Christl’s mother’s family, the Mautner Markhofs, and Josef and Dorothea Engelhart were also close friends of Alma Schindler, later Mahler, and her family.
Mahler’s villa and composing hut at Maiernigg (via wikimedia.org)
It’s possible that Christl Engelhart was actually born at the family’s villa in Sekirn, in July 1900, though all of the sources that I’ve found give her birthplace as Pritschitz, on the northern shore of the lake. Perhaps that was simply where the birth was registered? Certainly, she and her siblings would have spent many of their childhood summers at the villa in Sekirn, just a few minutes’ walk from the lakeside.*
The Engelhart children with their parents and governesses, Lake Attersee, summer 1906 (from Josef Engelhart: Vorstadt und Salon)
However, many of the family photographs that I’ve seen show the Engelharts on holiday at another Austrian lake – Attersee, in the Salzkammergut in upper Austria. Interestingly, this was another location that Mahler chose for his summer composing retreats. Josef Engelhart’s Secession colleague Gustav Klimt also frequented a small island castle on the lake during the summer months. Finally, as I noted here, the Engelharts spent some of their summer holidays at Malcesine on Lake Garda in northern Italy, the scene for a number of the artist’s paintings featuring his children.
However, perhaps the greater part of Christl Engelhart’s childhood would have been spent at the family’s main residence in Vienna. In 1901, when Christl would have been just one year old, her father acquired a property on Steingasse, next to the house where he had grown up. Engelhart had it renovated in Art Nouveau style by the architect Ferdinand Fellner, incorporating a glass-fronted studio and with murals painted by his brother-in-law Koloman Moser. According to one source, ‘the house became the location for legendary festivals and grand soirées.’
This was the world in which Theodor Kern’s future wife spent her early years.
The Engelharts’ house at 15 Steingasse, Vienna (via http://www.jugendstilwien.at and Josef Engelhart: Vorstadt und Salon)
* I should perhaps have added that it was to Sekirn, and presumably to the Villa Engelhart, that Christl came initially when her marriage to Theodor Kern broke down, which was in 1931 or thereabouts. In time, she would move back to Vienna, perhaps to the family’s house on Steingasse. I wonder if she and Theodor, who also made Vienna his home from about 1934 to 1938, ever met again?
For an update, see this post.
Theodor Kern 