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Jacob Maentel
1763–1863
BirthplaceKassel, Germany
Death placeNew Harmony, Indiana, United States of America
BiographyWorking in German immigrant communities in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, itinerant self-taught artist Jacob Maentel painted small-scale portraits in watercolors, many minutely recording the décor of domestic interiors. Maentel (from the German Mäntel, and sometimes varied as Mentel, Mentle, Mendel, and Mantell) was born in Kassel, Germany, a cosmopolitan center of art and culture. Drafted into the army of revolutionary France when parts of his native region were conquered by Napoleon Bonaparte, Maentel apparently served as a secretary to the French military leader. In 1805 or 1806, following the death of his father and his discharge from the army, Maentel immigrated to the United States.
Maentel arrived in the port of Baltimore, Maryland, where he advertised for portrait commissions. He applied for citizenship at York, Pennsylvania, where he found himself at home among a large German-speaking immigrant population, and he enlisted in the local militia as it prepared for the conflict with Great Britain that broke out in 1812. During his time in the militia, Maentel painted several portraits of military officers and members of their families, typically showing them full-length, posed in the corners of well-furnished parlors of which the walls and floors boast lively patterned surface decoration.
Following his marriage in 1819, Maentel lived in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. Over the next two decades, the artist produced numerous portraits of local residents, many of them German Americans. His full-length likenesses of individuals in interiors are valued today as documentation of the local ethnic community’s distinctive style of domestic furnishing and decoration, notably the painted, stenciled, or applied preprinted patterns that enlivened their rural, middle-class parlors. Maentel also pictured his subjects in landscape settings. Many portraits attributed to him are incorporated into the highly decorated birth, baptismal, and marriage certificates that form the tradition of so-called fraktur painting characteristic of the Pennsylvania Dutch community.
Around 1836, Maentel decided to move his family to Texas, a place of new opportunity that had become a magnet for German immigrants. Illness interrupted their journey in Indiana, however, and the family settled in a former utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana. As late as 1850, Maentel continued to work as an itinerant portrait painter in Indiana and Illinois. In addition to his highly detailed, small-scale watercolor likenesses, he painted landscape scenes on firescreens, adding decoration to these wood or canvas barriers positioned before parlor hearths to deflect the direct heat from fires.
Maentel died in New Harmony at the age of eighty-five and was virtually forgotten. The details of his career have been reconstructed painstakingly in recent decades, with the result that several profile portraits originally attributed to the contemporary German immigrant artist Samuel Endredi Stettinius (1768–1813) are now believed to be Maentel’s work.
Maentel arrived in the port of Baltimore, Maryland, where he advertised for portrait commissions. He applied for citizenship at York, Pennsylvania, where he found himself at home among a large German-speaking immigrant population, and he enlisted in the local militia as it prepared for the conflict with Great Britain that broke out in 1812. During his time in the militia, Maentel painted several portraits of military officers and members of their families, typically showing them full-length, posed in the corners of well-furnished parlors of which the walls and floors boast lively patterned surface decoration.
Following his marriage in 1819, Maentel lived in Lebanon County, Pennsylvania. Over the next two decades, the artist produced numerous portraits of local residents, many of them German Americans. His full-length likenesses of individuals in interiors are valued today as documentation of the local ethnic community’s distinctive style of domestic furnishing and decoration, notably the painted, stenciled, or applied preprinted patterns that enlivened their rural, middle-class parlors. Maentel also pictured his subjects in landscape settings. Many portraits attributed to him are incorporated into the highly decorated birth, baptismal, and marriage certificates that form the tradition of so-called fraktur painting characteristic of the Pennsylvania Dutch community.
Around 1836, Maentel decided to move his family to Texas, a place of new opportunity that had become a magnet for German immigrants. Illness interrupted their journey in Indiana, however, and the family settled in a former utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana. As late as 1850, Maentel continued to work as an itinerant portrait painter in Indiana and Illinois. In addition to his highly detailed, small-scale watercolor likenesses, he painted landscape scenes on firescreens, adding decoration to these wood or canvas barriers positioned before parlor hearths to deflect the direct heat from fires.
Maentel died in New Harmony at the age of eighty-five and was virtually forgotten. The details of his career have been reconstructed painstakingly in recent decades, with the result that several profile portraits originally attributed to the contemporary German immigrant artist Samuel Endredi Stettinius (1768–1813) are now believed to be Maentel’s work.