35 x 49 cm
Oil on canvas
A portrait painter and illustrator who had traveled around the world three times and who, before the war, kept studios in Paris and Düsseldorf as well as at 106 West 55th Street, died on November 27 at St. Mark’s Hospital, on Second Avenue. He was 65 years old and is survived by a niece and a great-granddaughter. Born in Düsseldorf to a French mother and an Italian father, he studied art in Paris, Germany, and Holland. During the Boer War he served with British forces as an artist-correspondent, finding time to paint several pictures. Among the portraits he later painted were those of the German Emperor, Queen Wilhelmina, Queen Alexandra of England, the Queen of Spain, the former Princess Louise of Saxony, Presidents Loubet and Wilson, and Sarah Bernhardt. He held commissions from the British government to paint portraits of the leading princes of India, and was also about to paint Geraldine Farrar, Emily Destinn, and, it is said, Mr. Henry C. Frick. Mr. Langenberg was at one time associated with the museum in Cologne. He often traveled through Europe and elsewhere on horseback, and while in Mexico he was on intimate terms with President Díaz. There are men who seem to have been born in the wrong place, in the wrong century, and who spend their entire lives trying to correct that error through movement. Gustave C. Langenberg was one of them. He was born in Düsseldorf in 1859, but Düsseldorf was already a fiction within him from the start: his mother was French, his father an Italian subject. That triple inheritance gave him no homeland — it gave him appetite. The world was the only territory that could contain him, and painting the only passport he needed.
He trained where he had to: Paris first, then Germany, then Holland. The Düsseldorf School gave him rigor of drawing, clarity of line, that almost Protestant respect for form that sets its painters apart from the French, more inclined to dissolve contour into light. But Langenberg was not a man of the academy or the quiet studio. He learned what he needed and left. He traveled around the world three times. Not on a luxury liner, not with a diplomat’s baggage. Langenberg crossed Europe — and, where he could, the rest of the world — on horseback. That detail from the obituary, noted almost in passing among the titles and the portraits of queens, is in fact the most revealing: the man preferred the speed of the animal to the comfort of the railway, the slow, tactile route over the efficiency of modernity. He was, in the most literal sense, a voluntary anachronism. He arrived in South Africa during the Boer War — not as a soldier, but as an artist-correspondent for the British army. On the battlefields of the Transvaal he found what every painter of his temperament sought: history in the making, violence rendered in light, the unrepeatable instant that photography still could not fully capture. He painted battle scenes that ended up in European museums, in the hands of the Dutch government, in collections that today sit forgotten in storage, their origin unremembered by anyone. Then came the era of the palaces. Langenberg had a particular gift for inspiring confidence in the powerful — or perhaps he simply knew how to move through their antechambers with the ease of a man who needs nothing from anyone because he already has everything: the horse, the brush, the world. He painted Kaiser Wilhelm II. He painted Queen Wilhelmina of Holland, Queen Alexandra of England, the Queen of Spain, the former Princess Louise of Saxony. He painted Presidents Loubet and Wilson. He painted Sarah Bernhardt. He held commissions from the British government to paint the leading princes of India. He was about to paint Geraldine Farrar, Emily Destinn, and — it is said — Mr. Henry C. Frick. That «it is said» from the obituary is significant. Langenberg also lived in rumor, in expectation, in the project forever pending. He was the kind of man from whom something more was always expected.
He arrived in Mexico during the Porfiriato, that period when the country was opening itself, with calculated urgency, to prestigious foreigners. He was close to Porfirio Díaz — one imagines the conversations they must have had, the mestizo dictator who dreamed of a European Mexico, and the mixed-blood European who roamed the world on horseback. Two self-made men. Two men who knew exactly the value of a good image. Before the war he kept simultaneous studios in Paris and Düsseldorf, as well as at 106 West 55th Street in New York. Three cities, three studios: the geography of a man who could not stop moving. Paris for prestige, Düsseldorf for roots, New York for the future the 20th century promised to those who knew how to arrive on time. But the war came first. The Great War undid the studios in Paris and Düsseldorf, turned Europe into an impossible territory, and Langenberg stayed in New York — that city that belongs to no one and therefore to everyone — with his unfinished commissions and his suspended projects. He died on November 27 at St. Mark’s Hospital, on Second Avenue. He was sixty-five years old. He was survived by a niece and a great-granddaughter. The man who had painted emperors and queens, who had slept on battlefields and ridden across three continents, died in a hospital bed in a city he had come to know only at the very end, surrounded by absences. The obituary notes that he was once associated with the museum in Cologne. That he traveled around the world three times. That he usually got around on horseback. That is all that was written down. The rest lives in paintings scattered across collections no one tracks, in portraits of kings that museums catalogue by sitter rather than by painter, in Boer War battle scenes that someone hung on a wall a hundred years ago and that may still be there, unsigned, unnamed. Langenberg was one of those artists the 20th century chose not to remember, not because he did not deserve to be remembered, but because his patrons were exactly the kind of world that century wanted to forget: the Empire, the Porfiriato, the courts, the palaces. He left with them, or they left with him. It amounts to the same thing. What remains is the horse. What remains is the image of that man crossing Europe at a walking pace, canvases rolled up in his saddlebags and the next portrait already forming in his mind, traveling toward some palace or some battlefield, unhurried and without a fixed destination, painting the world while the world still believed in its own ceremonies.