Gustav Adolf Hippius

Gustav Adolf Hippius (; 12 March 1792, Nissi - 6 October 1856, Tallinn (Reval), Governorate of Estonia, Russian Empire) was a Baltic German portrait painter and lithographer.

Early life and education Gustav Adolf Hippius was born in Nissi, Estonia, into the family of a poor rural pastor, in 1792. He lost his mother at a very young age and was sent to a boarding school in Reval (Tallinn). From the age of 14, he began to earn money for his education by giving lessons in music and drawing, for which he showed particular talent. Hippius initially wanted to pursue a teaching career, but poverty prevented him from attending university.

His first teacher was Eduard Höpner at a gymnasium in Tallinn (Reval) from 1807 to 1811. In Tallinn, Gustav Adolf met Otto Friedrich Ignatius, the son of the Hageri parish pastor David Friedrich Ignatius. Otto was two years younger than Hippius and already chosen the path of an artist. David Friedrich Ignatius ran a boarding house where Carl Sigismund Walther, a German painter invited by August von Kotzebue who otherwise worked as a home tutor for children, gave drawing lessons to the young men. Walther became a great example and influence for both Hippius and Ignatius. After about two years of study, the young men were ready to enter an art academy. (which is now at the Beethoven House in Bonn), and Thorvaldsen. Overbeck, in turn, painted his portrait. In his diary, Hippius wrote that his life's aspirations were reflected in his meetings with four outstanding people of his time – Beethoven, Overbeck, Thorvaldsen, and Pestalozzi – representing music, painting, other arts, and pedagogy.

Hippius was the first of the three friends to leave Italy. In the second half of 1818, he spent about a year in Switzerland, where he visited Pestalozzi in Yverdon and painted his portrait. Along with his portraits of Beethoven and Thorvaldsen, he valued this portrait more than all his other works and published it as a lithograph in 1846 to mark the great educator's centenary.

Later years Hippius returned to his native Estonia on 9 November 1819. After spending six months in Reval and marrying his friend's sister, Friederike Ignatius (1798-1886), in June 1820, he moved to Saint Petersburg. When Otto Ignatius died in 1824, Hippius had to complete his friend's final work – a mural commissioned for the court church at Tsarskoye Selo.

The artist's works became accidentally known to Count Kapodistria and Georg von Engelhardt, the director of the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. They supported him financially and enabled him to undertake the publication of "Contemporaries. A Collection of Lithographed Portraits of Government Officials, Writers, and Artists. Dedicated to His Imperial Majesty Emperor Alexander I. Les Contemporains, par G. Hippius" (1822, large folio), in 9 issues with 5 portraits in each (reproductions in enlarged form of portraits by Hippius himself). They had two daughters and two sons. Their sons Otto Pius and Karl Gustav became well-known architects. Through his daughters, Gustav Adolf was a grandfather to architect and pianist .

Legacy Hippius was a prolific portraitist whose work shows Nazarene influences, acquired during his seven-year educational journey. He is known to have portrayed almost all members of the German artists' colony in Rome. For example, in 1924, his drawing of Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein's portrait was in the Dresden Royal Print Cabinet, and Karl Fohr's portrait was in the Heidelberg city art collection. Riga Cathedral Museum held his portrait of Pezold. The artist was also interested in Estonian subjects. His well-known works "Estonian Young Wife" and "Estonian Bride" (1852) are in the collections of the Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn. Both paintings depict his servant Miina. Portrait art in the Baltic region began to flourish only at the beginning of the 19th century, strongly influenced by Gustav Adolf Hippius, Gerhard von Reutern, and August Pezold, who all traveled and studied in different countries. The life and art knowledge gained abroad made them depict the Estonian rural population in a manner completely different from what had been customary for the local Baltic Germans.

Published works

"The Young Draughtsman, a course of progressive studies for use in schools" in 4 notebooks, with 32 sheets of drawings An album of 66 sheets of heads from paintings by Italian masters of the 15th and 16th centuries and 24 sheets depicting various flowers. "Essays on the Theory of Drawing" was published in Saint Petersburg and Leipzig in 1842. "Art schools. Compiled for the needs of the school" (; Leipzig, 1850) was dedicated to a popular exposition of art history.