01 Paintings, Hellenic Mytheology, with footnotes 2B

Wilhelm Trübner, 1851 – 1917

The Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs, 1877

Oil on cardboard

Height: 94 cm (37.01 in.), Width: 79 cm (31.1 in.)

The theme of the painting is taken from Ovid. The Lapiths, a peace-loving people of Thessaly, were celebrating the wedding of their king Pirithous to Hippodamia. The Centaurs were invited but they quickly began to misbehave. One of them, Eurytus, full of liquor, tried to carry off the bride and soon a battle raged in which drinking vessels, table legs, antlers, in fact anything to hand, served as weapons. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. Finally, thanks chiefly for Theseus, the friend of Pirithous, who was among the guests, the Centaurs were driven off. To the ancients and to the Renaissance the theme symbolized the victory of civilization over barbarism. It was used to decorate Greek temples, notably the metopes of the Parthenon (the 'Elgin marbles'), and was popular with baroque painters. More on this painting

Wilhelm Trübner (February 3, 1851 – December 21, 1917) was a German realist painter born in Heidelberg and had early training as a goldsmith. In 1867 he met classicist painter Anselm Feuerbach who encouraged him to study painting, and he began studies in Karlsruhe under Fedor Dietz. The next year saw him studying at the Kunstacademie in Munich, where he was to be greatly impressed by an international exhibition of paintings by Leibl and Gustave Courbet. 

The early 1870s were a period of discovery for Trübner. He travelled to Italy, Holland and Belgium, and in Paris encountered the art of Manet, whose influence can be seen in the spontaneous yet restrained style of Trübner's portraits and landscapes. During this period he also made the acquaintance of Carl Schuch, Albert Lang and Hans Thoma, German painters who, like Trübner, greatly admired the unsentimental realism of Wilhelm Leibl.

He published writings on art theory in 1892 and 1898, which express above all the idea that "beauty must lie in the painting itself, not in the subject". By urging the viewer to discover beauty in a painting's formal values, its colors, proportions, and surface, Trübner advanced a philosophy of "art for art's sake". In 1901 he joined the recently formed Berlin Secession, at the time Germany's most important forum for the exhibition of avant-garde art. From 1903 until his death in 1917 he was a professor at the Academy of Arts in Karlsruhe, also serving as director from 1904 to 1910. More on Wilhelm Trübner

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