Peter Philippi

Peter Philippi (30 March 1866, Trier - 17 August 1945, Rothenburg ob der Tauber) was a German portrait and genre painter. Some sources, mostly art dealerships, give his year of death as 1958.

Biography His father, also named Peter Philippi, was a book seller and binder. His mother, Katharina née Theisen, was a winemaker's daughter from the Mosel region. In 1869, his father acquired a large, popular bookstore, which enabled Peter to attend the Royal Gymnasium. Upon graduating, in 1883, he left home to enroll at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. There is no record of any artistic training up to that time.

He studied there from 1884 to 1898, with a one-year interruption for military service. His primary instructors included Hugo Crola, Adolf Schill and Johann Peter Theodor Janssen. Later, he was accepted into the master class of the history painter, Eduard von Gebhardt, who was inclined to religious subject matter, but this had no influence on him. With graduation approaching, he joined the progressive artists' association, Malkasten. He remained in Düsseldorf, but maintained close contact with Trier. In 1905, he married a former fellow-student, Constanze Schmitz, originally from Berlin. They had one daughter.

Seeking an "unspoiled environment", he and Constanze moved to Rothenburg ob der Tauber in 1906. In 1910, he was named an extraordinary member of the Kunstakademie.

In 1923, together with and several younger, local artists, he helped establish the Rothenburger Künstlerbund, for which the city provided a permanent exhibition space. That same year, having divorced Constanze, he married Elisabeth Pies, from Trier. In 1930, he helped create a similar artists' association there. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, he was admitted to the Reich Chamber of Culture.

He remained conservative in his approach, calling the Biedermeier period "our last real stylistic epoch". Two years later, he was honored with his own exhibition. In 1944, he was added to the "Gottbegnadeten list" of painters who were crucial to Nazi culture.