28 Facts About Luise Duttenhofer

Christiane Luise Duttenhofer was a German papercutting artist.

Luise Duttenhofer was raised in a middle class Protestant family, who gave her some art education but did not permit her to become a professional artist.

Luise Duttenhofer made many paper cuts, of which more than 1500 are known, including silhouette portraits that were cut freehand.

Luise Duttenhofer worked on a wide variety of subjects, for example landscapes, animals and ornaments.

Luise Duttenhofer's work was shown in two exhibitions in Stuttgart during her lifetime and included in a collection of poetry that she illustrated together with her husband.

Luise Duttenhofer's art was largely forgotten after her death, but rediscovered in the early 20th century, when it was exhibited and reprinted multiple times.

Luise Duttenhofer was the only child of Georg Hummel, a Protestant pastor, and Luise Hedwig.

Luise Duttenhofer was then raised by her mother and grandmother.

Luise Duttenhofer later regretted not having a more thorough artistic education and would have liked to become a painter, but middle class expectations were that art was a leisure time activity, not a profession.

Luise Duttenhofer started papercutting as a child, cutting out gothic ornaments similar to the tracery she saw at church.

Luise Duttenhofer came from a Protestant background: his father was the prelate of Heilbronn, Christian Friedrich Duttenhofer, while his mother Johanna Christiana was a sister of Luise's father.

Christian Luise Duttenhofer had studied art at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts under Johann Christian Klengel and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Besides the interaction with these artists, another influence on Luise Duttenhofer's art was the experience of classical antiquity as well as the Italian Renaissance.

Luise Duttenhofer made two papercuts documenting the experience, one showing herself in bed while little gnomes carry away her infant son, another one of her son's corpse on a bier.

Luise Duttenhofer did not produce his own artwork, but made reproductions of the work of other artists.

In contrast, Luise Duttenhofer was creative and original in her paper cutting.

Luise Duttenhofer was supported by Johann Heinrich von Dannecker, a sculptor in whose workshop she made drawings based on his collection of copies of antiques that included copies of artwork brought to Paris by Napoleon as well as copies of the Parthenon Marbles.

Luise Duttenhofer influenced the papercutting artist Claire von Greyerz, whose work includes similar embossing techniques to Duttenhofer's, and the two women swapped papercuts.

Luise Duttenhofer died shortly after her return to Stuttgart, on 16 May 1829.

Luise Duttenhofer made many paper cuts; more than 1500 are known.

Luise Duttenhofer often worked on religious or mythological topics, but cut scenes from her own everyday life.

Luise Duttenhofer's silhouettes were usually free-hand cuts made without preparatory drawings, differentiating her from most other silhouettists.

Luise Duttenhofer usually cut in folded paper, creating two paper cuts that were mirror images of each other.

Some extant cuts show mirrored writing, making it plausible that Luise Duttenhofer gave away the correctly oriented papercut and kept the mirror image for her archives.

Luise Duttenhofer exhibited some of her work in Stuttgart in 1812 and in 1824.

Luise Duttenhofer was the most important silhouettist of her age in Germany, but her work was mostly forgotten after her death and only re-discovered in the early 20th century by the art historian Gustav Edmund Pazaurek and exhibited in Dusseldorf in 1909.

Luise Duttenhofer's descendants gave most of her oeuvre to the Schiller-Nationalmuseum: 337 folio pages containing at least one papercut each were donated to the same museum by Otto Tafel in 1911 and 1933.

Luise Duttenhofer's papercuts have been exhibited several times and reprinted in various editions.