Hans Gabriel Jentzsch

Hans Gabriel Jentzsch was born in Löbtau on November 26, 1862 and died in Munich on October 24, 1930. He was a German graphic artist, illustrator and caricaturist who worked for the satirical magazine “Der Wahre Jacob”, among others.
Jentzsch came from a family of carpenters and initially learned porcelain painting. From 1881 to 1887, he studied at the Dresden Academy under Fred Hildenbrandt and Ferdinand Pauwels. There, in 1885, he made his first public appearance with history and genre paintings and was awarded a gold medal for his work “The Fall of Man”. The painting shows Eve lying on a rose-paved floor and handing Adam an apple that she has plucked from a hanging branch.
In 1890, Jentzsch moved to Munich, where he exhibited his paintings and enjoyed great success with works such as “After the Rain” and “The Honeymoon”. However, he became particularly well known as an illustrator for “Der Wahre Jacob”, for which he worked from 1891. There he drew socially critical and later also political satirical illustrations, above all about the Wilhelmine aristocracy, the upper middle classes and the politics of the major European powers. Jentzsch remained the paper’s most productive illustrator alongside Otto Emil Lau for almost 30 years and was very popular with readers. In total, he created around 2000 illustrations for “Der Wahre Jacob” and also published caricatures in “Fliegende Blätter”.
Jentzsch’s illustrations were characterized by their ingenious spatiality, with the action spread across different levels. He often used a proscenium as a stylistic device to enhance the effect of his pictures and managed to depict objects in such a way that they stood out from the pictorial space and appealed intensely to the viewer. Another characteristic feature of his art was the so-called two-layered space, in which foreground and background were contrasted without any intermediate gradation, which contributed to the characterization of the people depicted.
Between 1899 and 1915, Jentzsch created three series of Dances of Death, including the “Russian Dance of Death” during the First World War, which portrayed Russia as barbaric and violent.