Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel valuation
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.
What a work by Ludwig Heinrich Jungnickel is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
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Bio
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.
Provenance between 1933 and 1945
Austrian and German works on paper of this period carry a specific burden that comparable British or American material does not. A gap in the ownership record between 1933 and 1945 is the first thing a saleroom's research department looks for, and an unexplained one can stop a consignment before any discussion of value begins. This is not an accusation levelled at any particular work; it is simply the standard applied to everything from these years.
What resolves it is ordinarily dull: an old invoice, an exhibition label on the reverse, a dealer's stock number, an inscription, a family letter, a probate valuation. Photograph the reverse and any labels or stamps on the mount and the backing board before anything is reframed, because that is where the evidence usually is and reframing is how it usually gets thrown away.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
