Ernst Carl Friedrich te Peerdt
Alt-Mühltal, 1886/1887

Alfred Flechtheim and Ernst Carl Friedrich te Peerdt

Ernst Carl Friedrich te Peerdt, born on 25 November, 1852 in Tecklenburg, is considered a pioneer of Impressionism and plein-air painting in Germany. He created naturalistic genre scenes and painted landscapes and still lifes. He was also a writer and art historian for which he gained his doctorate from the University of Bonn. Te Peerdt studied art under Eduard Bendemann in Düsseldorf in 1868. During his studies in Munich under Karl von Piloty and Wilhelm von Diez that immediately followed, his Hungarian-Slovakian painter colleague Pál Szinyei Merse made him acquainted with French Impressionism. Te Peerdt was taught by Ludwig Knaus in Berlin. He travelled around Italy for several years, settled in Munich in 1884, later moving to Düsseldorf in 1893. He did not achieve any success as an artist for a long time until he managed to sell his Impressionist ‚Parkszene’ of 1873 to the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. Te Peerdt became well known through his participation at the Sonderbund exhibition in 1910 in Düsseldorf.

As a collector of his works and his patron Alfred Flechtheim added the artist to his gallery agenda from 1913 onwards and presented his works at the opening exhibition of his rooms in Düsseldorf. The art dealer also arranged for paintings by te Peerdt to be included in the Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914. That same year, the Galerie Alfred Flechtheim staged the first retrospective of artist’s work and also showed te Peerdt it is summer exhibition. Despite low sales at Flechtheim’s auction in Berlin in 1917, te Peerdt’s works were included in the re-opening of the gallery rooms in Düsseldorf in 1919. Flechtheim showed the painter at group exhibitions in 1919 (‚Auf dem Wege zur Kunst unserer Zeit’), in 1924 (‚Stilleben’) and in 1930 (‚Seit Liebermann in Deutschland’). The artist died on 20 February, 1932 in Düsseldorf.