Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel
Viennese animal painter of the Wiener Werkstatte circle, who drew at the zoo for sixty years.
Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel was born in Wunsiedel in Bavaria in 1881 and became one of the most distinctive figures of Viennese modernism, associated with the Wiener Werkstatte and with the Klimt circle, exhibiting at the 1908 Kunstschau. He specialised in animals — monkeys, big cats, birds, deer — drawn from long observation at the Schonbrunn menagerie and rendered in colour woodcut, stencil, gouache and etching with a decorative flatness that owes much to Japanese printmaking. He decorated the nursery of the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. Banned from exhibiting under the Nazi regime, he spent years in Croatia and returned to Vienna, dying there in 1965.
This is principally an Austrian and German market. The early colour woodcuts and stencil prints from the Wiener Werkstatte years are the most sought, and are scarce; the drawings, watercolours and gouaches of animals are far more numerous and form the bulk of what trades. Because so much is on paper in water-based media, light damage, foxing and mount-burn are widespread and are the main determinants of value alongside subject. Provenance across the 1938 to 1945 period should be checked, as for any Vienna-based artist.
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