San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Print’s colorful ancestor at the Witte
I was wondering about the origin of a picture from my great-grandparents’ home. I remember years ago seeing a very similar picture in the Witte Museum. My great-grandparents lived at 327 Elm St. in San Antonio, and my dad said it hung in their parlor. On the back of the picture is a notation that says, “Dr. Knoll’s office where man is standing in door.” The writing is not from anyone that I have seen. I have Googled “Dr. Knoll” and also put it in Google Lens, but it just looked at the inscription and told me that the location was 1866 E. Crockett St. I think that the spires of both San Fernando Cathedral and St Joseph’s Catholic Church are seen in the background. Is there anything you can tell me about the source of the print?
Virginia Ullrich-Serna, Redmond, Washington
Your print is probably a third-generation descendant of a painting that hangs in the Witte Museum. It’s 13 inches by 20 inches, done in softly glowing color by Karl Friedrich Hermann Lungkwitz (1813-1891), a German-born landscape artist who came to Texas in 1851. According to the Handbook of Texas, he first settled near Fredericksburg, where he learned photography. He moved to San Antonio in 1866 to practice that trade, relocating after a few years to Austin, where he became photographer for the General Land Office and taught drawing and painting.
“His Texas studies,” states the handbook, including those of “old San Antonio,” provide “unexcelled examples of romantic landscape scenes and visual documentation of 19th-century Texas.”
The one from which your print derives is titled “Crockett Street Looking West” and was signed and dated 1857 in the lower right-hand corner, said Amy Fulkerson, the Witte’s chief curator. In the original painting, Lungkwitz “rendered this panoramic view in a meticulous, clearly delineated manner, using true, sharp colors,” wrote Cecilia Steinfeldt, a former Witte curator, in “Art for History’s Sake.” Because of the precision of his style, the painting is “accepted as the most valid and historically accurate existing mid-nineteenth-century visual document of the site.”
Fulkerson noted that the colorful painting is “quite wonderful in its detail.” The back of the Alamo is visible on the right, and San Fernando Cathedral can be seen in the center of the painting. “Some of the figures in the painting have been tentatively identified,” she said. In the doorway on the right, the man depicted “is presumed to be Mayor W.C.A. Thielpape, as that was the location of his home.” At left, the man carrying a saw is thought to be Wenzel Friedrich, carpenter, cabinetmaker and manufacturer of horn furniture, whose home was across from Thielpape’s house.
Also in the Witte’s collection are a preliminary pencil sketch for the painting dated 1852 and a German lithograph, thought to have been published around 1867. Printed in Dresden, the lithograph has the scene depicted in “Crockett Street Looking West” surrounded by eight smaller scenes, including views of the San Antonio missions, San Fernando, San Pedro Springs and the San Antonio River. The lithograph — which might be the most direct ancestor of your print
—is inscribed in the lower left, “Taken from Nature by H. Lungkwitz.” On the lower right, the publisher is identified as “Rau & Sone Lith., Dres- den.”
Fulkerson said what you have might be a “photographic print based off of a lithograph based on the painting,” noting that she has seen “other reproductions made in this manner that have inscriptions and attributions similar to yours.”
Your print’s possible ancestor may be seen in the Witte’s B. Naylor Morton Research and Collections Center, open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
“Dr. Knoll’s office,” it seems, might really have been Mayor Thielpape’s house. Bexar County Medical Society sources searched books and oth- er records of San Antonio and Texas medicine at the organization’s headquarters and in the P.I. Nixon Medical Historical Library at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and found no reference to any “Dr. Knoll” here. “I would suggest that he may have been a ‘treatment doctor’ but not an M.D.,” or possibly a dentist, said Dr. J.J. Waller Jr., the society’s resident historian.
Whoever first bought or sold your print must have known of “Dr. Knoll” and thought he was familiar enough for other people to understand the location in relation to his office. If so, he didn’t leave much of a trace. Volunteers at the San Antonio Conservation Society Library searched city directories — which had not yet been published during the year the original painting was produced — and didn’t find a Dr. Knoll or anyone with that surname or any doctor at that location in any of a series of late 19th-century directories. Knoll didn’t come up in a newspaper search either — if he was here, he might not have stayed very long.