Adolph Jentsch


Adolph Stephan Friedrich Jentsch was a German-born Namibian artist. He studied at the Dresden Staatsakademie für Bildende Künste for six years, and used a travel grant award to visit France, Italy, UK and the Netherlands. Jentsch moved to Namibia in 1938 to escape the approaching war and lived there until his death. He travelled extensively in Namibia and eventually settled down near Dordabis, about 60 km from the capital Windhoek. He is one of Namibia's most famous painters.

Life and career

Germany

Jentsch was the son of a Lutheran church official, Stephan Jentsch, and his wife Adele. He attended the gymnasium of the Brudergemeine Zinzendorf, at Nieski. Six years of further education followed at Dresden's Staatsakademie fϋr Bildende Künste. Other student artists at the Academy were Pechstein, Grosz and Schwitters. He was awarded the Königlich-Sächsiche Staatsmedaille fur Kunst und Wissenschaft and several travel grants. Later, Jentsch often worked for Gussman, decorating public buildings.
Jentsch was in the Jäger-Reserve in the First World War, but developed a crippling rheumatism that put him into a military hospital at Neustadt for a year. After the war, he married a young divorcee, Anne Ilgen, in 1920, and together they operated a small factory making spray-containers for perfume. Anne ran the factory while Jentsch painted. A son, Christoph, was born in 1921.
Jentsch illustrated a children's book in 1927, and joined a group of interior decorators in Czechoslovakia. He worked on colour schemes and decorative painting on jobs in Germany and Czechoslovakia.

Namibia

Jentsch's antipathy to National Socialism resulted in a loss of commissions, so he took up an offer to vacation on a friend's farm in Namibia. He arrived in Africa in early 1938, and never left, working in oils and watercolour until his death in 1977.
Jentsch painted landscapes almost exclusively, working in watercolour and oil. He was interested in Oriental philosophy, specifically Taoism, and was influenced by Chinese Art. He travelled extensively in Namibia, staying at many farms and painting the diverse landscapes, but in 1947 he finally settled on a farm near Dordabis called Brack, about 60 km from Windhoek, with his friends Gebhard and Dorothee von Funcke.
Jentsch found the Namibian landscape amenable to his mystic approach to art. His watercolours display the same calligraphic strokes seen in Chinese art. In 1960 Jentsch abandoned oils and worked only in watercolour.

Later life

In the early 1970s he suffered a stroke that left him with a severe tremor and stopped him painting completely. Jentsch and Dorothea von Funcke moved into a modest house in Windhoek for the last few years of his life.
Five of his paintings were reproduced as stamps in 1973 – the first non-commemorative stamps in South Africa philatelic history.
In 1975, farm workers at Brack, attempting to smoke out a wasp's nest, started a fire next to the old barn where Jentsch stored much of his oeuvre. The barn caught fire and burned down, with the result that the product of 40 years, including some of his most important works, was tragically lost.
Four of Jentsch's watercolours were reproduced in limited editions by Orde Levinson in 1975.

Awards