In this first in a series of articles leading up to an exhibition and publication in 2018 marking the bicentenary of the Schranz artists’ arrival in Malta, John J. Schranz looks at the travels of Anton, Giovanni, Antonio and Giuseppe Schranz in the context of their times.

In his fine essay ‘The lure of the Orient (Hyphen, 1987, Vol.V, no.3), Dominic Cutajar charts the Schranz artists’ many travels. Latest figures of the frequency, duration and extent of the leading four’s journeys are impressive.

Born 1769 in Ochsenhausen, Anton Schranz sets the trend, leaving Germany around 1786. We next find him in Menorca, in February 1791. Seven months after buying a house there he moves again, in 1817, to Malta. His wife, Isabella, arrives with their children in 1818.

In 1826, Giovanni Schranz, the eldest, then 32, left Malta for 15 months on his first recorded painting journey. September 1830 saw his last known journey. Perhaps he was not considering stopping: he procured a passport days before his 1833 marriage, which soon generated nine children.

Antonio and Giuseppe Schranz, who were 17 and 15 respectively when they arrived in Malta, started much younger than Giovanni. When they were 22 in 1823 and 1825 respectively, they opened their travel floodgates.

Around 1835, Giuseppe settled in Istanbul, that throbbing metropolis; Maltese painter Count Amedeo Preziosi followed around 1840. Often called ‘cosmopolitan’ because Parisian contacts and dealings apparently drew him there, Giuseppe’s talents were recognised immediately – Selim Satı Pasa, director of Istanbul’s prestigious Military Academy of Art, wrote in 1838: “The renowned and ingenious Spanish painter, Monsieur Schranz, was appointed to the professorship of painting” (Mirat-i-Meketeb-i Harbiye Reflections on the Military Academy, Artin Asaduryan, Istanbul, 1894, p.26).

Philæ (in Frederick Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, A Journey to Damascus, 1847, Vol. I). Antonio Schranz accompanied Castlereagh on his journey from Cairo to Damascus, making watercolour sketches en route.

‘Spanish’ surprises us: German father, Anglo-Hispanic mother, born in Menorca, relocated to Malta, widely travelled, living in Istanbul and – ‘Spanish’. Is flux a sign of the times?

Anton’s artist sons were born and grew up with Romantic nationalism, which peaked between 1800 and 1850. Seeing a people’s unity not in dynastic or imperialist hegemonies, but in shared folklore, traditions, religion, race, culture and language, this movement embraced the French Re­volution, then rejected Napoleon’s imperialism, only to subsequently see the Congress of Vienna, conceived to prevent wars, allowing major empires a stranglehold on European policies.

Undeterred, it fed the growing wave of self-determination, nationhood, liberalism and democracy. In 1830, a flush of revolutions hit. Conservative, reactionary forces quell them. The tide returns in 1848 when revolutions engulf Europe again. The old order totters, it tries to resist, but the nation State’s emergence is inevitable.

All over Europe, the US and South America, artists great and small energised the movement, some by precise design – Giuseppe Verdi’s Va Pensiero, Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People; others by vehement gestures – Ludwig van Beethoven deleted Napoleon Bonaparte’s name from the Eroica.

Transience and turmoil ruled, stability crumbled, and all artists contributed, knowingly or unknowingly. Responding to Percy Shelley’s “We are all Greeks!” and Lord Byron joining Greece’s revolution, many were drawn to the Mediterranean and Ottoman East, intrigued by that heaving arena’s rampant unrest and ‘Orientalism’.

Antonio and Giuseppe established themselves in Cairo and Istanbul respectively, two metropolises at that cauldron’s southernmost and northernmost tips. Throughout those 50 years, Egypt and Turkey are belligerent allies. Greece’s revolution is against both. Europe’s empires stand by to intervene.

La récolte des noisettes au Mont Athos(M.A. Proust, Voyage au Mont Athos in Le Tour du Monde, Deuxième Semestre, Ch. Lahure, Paris, 1860). This engraving, from a drawing by Proust, is the only known image of Antonio’s face.

Though also capturing delightful, everyday moments, Giuseppe’s theme becomes, indicatively, the Bosphorus: Europe’s and Asia’s liquid frontier. His brother’s theme is drought, sand, dust, repeated odysseys, painting patrons’ journeys for publications revealing that vast region’s deadly hostilities.

Antonio’s 1831 album records his first painting journey, in revolution-torn Greece: “A collection of drawings of Morea, drawn on the spot by A. Schranz Junior, 1831.” In 1836, Lord Lindsay describes meeting Antonio who, with two friends, gives up visiting nearby Palmyra, their destination, as war was being waged there (Letters on Egypt, 1838, Vol.2 p.164).

Antonio was in Jordan, with Lord Castle­reagh, who, while sunning himself dry after washing in the sea, sees 500 men engaged in furious battle hurtling past, paces away, vanishing, then hurtling back, chased (Journey to Damascus, 1847, Vol.2 p.45). Events that Robert Pashley describes throughout their Travels in Crete (1837) are gothic horrors.

Le Marchand de Bonbons à Constantinople, lithograph by Bayot, from the drawing by Giuseppe (Joseph) Schranz.

A conservative estimate of Antonio’s travels indicates over 150,000km through vast, strife-riven territories, between 1823 and 1851, when before dying Mehmet Ali resolved the Egypt/Ottoman Porte confrontation, launching modern Egypt. Antonio’s last identified painting journey was in 1851 – in Egypt, with Lord Allendale. In 1858 he was invited to another journey, to Mount Athos – his photographs would become engravings illustrating a feuilleton published by M.A. Proust (Manet’s great friend, later French minister of culture). One of the earliest photo­graphers, Antonio opened Cairo’s first photographic studio, 10 years before anybody else.

“Like the genuine Romantic he was,” says Cutajar, Giuseppe renders skies with “enthusiastic sweeps, alluding to superhuman immensities”; this, however, never “weakens his ability to analyse the Levant’s flamboyance with western eyes.”

In recent exchanges with the author, Cutajar described the finest drawings he had seen in a portfolio of Antonio’s as “overwhelming stage-sets”, superbly unleashing “forces of nature – turbulent seas, sandstorms – which show Antonio was a full-blown Romantic, restrained only by his clients’ demand for topographic views, mementos of travels.

“I emphasise his Romantic vocation, particularly as in 19th century Maltese art, Antonio emerges as the sole authentic Romantic artist”.

John J. Schranz is a descendant of Anton Schranz’s eldest son Giovanni. To mark the 2018 bicentenary of the Schranz artists’ arrival in Malta, Heritage Malta is organising an exhibition in collaboration with the Committee for the Schranz Artists Bicentenary Exhibition 1818-2018, while Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti will launch a publication on their times, lives and works. Both will feature all eight artists, born in three generations in 70 years, between 1769 and 1839.