Franz Caspar Hugo Goedecker (c. 1840 – 15 December 1884) was a German wine merchant and artist who settled in England. Outside his business career, Goedecker was also an officer of the German Athenaeum Club and a caricaturist for the London magazine '' Vanity Fair''.

Life

A native of Bingen in the

Rhineland The Rhineland ( ; ; ; ) is a loosely defined area of Western Germany along the Rhine, chiefly Middle Rhine, its middle section. It is the main industrial heartland of Germany because of its many factories, and it has historic ties to the Holy ...

,C. R. Hennings, ''Deutsche in England'' (Stuttgart, 1923) pp. 98–99 Goedecker was born about 1840, 1881 England Census, 3 April 1881
High Street, Lewisham
at ancestry.com, accessed 24 October 2020 :
"143 & 145 High St: Franz Goedecker, Mar., 41, Lodger, Merchant, ornGermany" and studied at

Munich Munich is the capital and most populous city of Bavaria, Germany. As of 30 November 2024, its population was 1,604,384, making it the third-largest city in Germany after Berlin and Hamburg. Munich is the largest city in Germany that is no ...

. By the 1860s, he was living in England and working as a wine merchant. With other Germans living in England, including the painter Richard Huttula, Carl Haag, Wilhelm Kumpel, and Joseph Wolf, an animal-painter, Goedecker joined the London-based ''Verein für Kunst und Wissenschaft'' (Society for Art and Science). In the late 1860s, he was part of a group called ''Gemütliches Deutschland'' ("Easygoing Germany)" which met at the Hotel de la Boule d'Or, in

Soho SoHo, short for "South of Houston Street, Houston Street", is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City. Since the 1970s, the neighborhood has been the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, art installations such as The Wall ...

, whose members later joined the German Athenaeum of London. In 1874, Goedecker was the secretary of the art department of the German Athenaeum and was thanked by the chairman, Carl Haag, for organizing a musical Composition Evening. By 1879, he was a committee member of the German Athenaeum. In 1881, he was living in lodgings in

Lewisham Lewisham ( ) is an area of southeast London, England, south of Charing Cross. It is the principal area of the London Borough of Lewisham, and was within the Historic counties of England, historic county of Kent until 1889. It is identified in ...

High Street and was described for that year's census as a married 41-year-old merchant born in Germany. He also had business offices in

St James's Street St James's Street is the principal street in the district of St James's, central London. It runs from Piccadilly downhill to St James's Palace and Pall Mall. The main gatehouse of the Palace is at the southern end of the road; in the 17th centu ...

, with Francis Moll, and Goedecker & Moll traded as wine and spirits merchants. He sometimes anglicized his name as "Francis Goedecker". On 15 November 1883, Goedecker and Moll dissolved their partnership.

In 1883, ''The Theatre'' described Goedecker as "The leading spirit of the parody, and one of the most popular members of the club... one of the very ablest of living caricaturists..." and noted that on a recent occasion he had modelled a head of Bismarck and another of Sir Julius Benedict in only five minutes. In July of that year, he took part in a Royal Fete at South Kensington, modelling busts in the West Pavilion before a performance of the farce "Six and Eightpence" by Herbert and Mrs Beerbohm Tree. Goedecker died in the Rhineland in December 1884, in a railway carriage on a train travelling between

Ingelheim Ingelheim (), officially Ingelheim am Rhein (), is a town in the Mainz-Bingen Districts of Germany, district in the Rhineland-Palatinate state of Germany. The town sprawls along the Rhine's left bank. It has been Mainz-Bingen's district seat sin ...

and Bingen. At the time of his death, his address in England was 1, Limes Terrace,

Kent Kent is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Essex across the Thames Estuary to the north, the Strait of Dover to the south-east, East Sussex to the south-west, Surrey to the west, and Gr ...

, and he left an estate valued at £3,411 (), having appointed two other German business men living in England as his executors. In his book ''Englische Sprach-Schnitzer'' (1886), "O'Clarus Hiebslac Esq. M. A., Fellow of the German Athenaeum", noted that the English had had trouble pronouncing the name of Goedecker, saying instead "Goodacre", "Godsacre", or even "George Decker". He added in a footnote that his talented friend was now at rest in the Godsacre of his ancestral Bingen and would live on in the memory of his many friends. In 1907, the firm of Goedecker & Moll was still trading and held a royal warrant as wine-merchants to

King Edward VII Edward VII (Albert Edward; 9 November 1841 – 6 May 1910) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 22 January 1901 until his death in 1910. The second child and eldest son of Queen Victoria and ...

. In 1919, it was still in existence, with a royal warrant to supply wine to

King George V George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert; 3 June 1865 – 20 January 1936) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 until his death in 1936. George was born during the reign of his pa ...

Work

Helmuth von Moltke Vanity Fair 23 August 1884

An outline of Goedecker by the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

calls him a "Watercolourist, draughtsman and caricaturist".F. Goedecker
at

, accessed 24 October 2020 His illustrations for ''Vanity Fair'' included caricatures of

Hubert Herkomer Sir Hubert von Herkomer (born as Hubert Herkomer; 26 May 1849 – 31 March 1914) was a Bavarian-born British painter, pioneering film-director, and composer. Though a very successful portrait artist, especially of men, he is mainly remembered fo ...

, Carl Haag, Count von Moltke,

Prince Victor of Hohenlohe-Langenburg Admiral Prince Victor Ferdinand Franz Eugen Gustaf Adolf Constantin Friedrich of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, (11 December 1833 – 31 December 1891), also known as Count von Gleichen, was an officer in the Royal Navy, and a sculptor. Biography He wa ...

, and perhaps Tom Nickalls. Goedecker’s Moltke, published on 23 August 1884, has the title "Modern Strategy".Roy T. Matthews, Peter Mellini, ''In "Vanity Fair"'' (University of California Press, 1982)
p. 133
/ref> Roy T. Matthews calls it "one of the notable examples of the consistency of ''Vanity Fair''s style of caricature" and says of it "The aging general’s features and figure are sharply exaggerated, so that in a glance the viewer can comprehend the essence of the individual, yet recognize the man." In March 1883, Goedecker sent

John Ruskin John Ruskin (8 February 1819 20 January 1900) was an English polymath a writer, lecturer, art historian, art critic, draughtsman and philanthropist of the Victorian era. He wrote on subjects as varied as art, architecture, Critique of politic ...

photographs of some of his work, and received a reply: Sir Edward Tyas Cook, Alexander Dundas Ogilvy Wedderburn, eds., ''The Works of John Ruskin'', Vol. 39 (1912), p. 232
Summary A LETTER ADDRESSED TO FRANZ GOEDECKER Brantwood, March 23, 1883
at cambridge.org, accessed 25 October 2020 A later writer commented on this that Ruskin had himself been caricatured in ''Vanity Fair'' more than once.Mark Bills, ''The Art of Satire: London in Caricature'' (Museum of London, 2006), p. 181 A portrait by Goedecker of his fellow German artist Hubert Herkomer is in the

National Portrait Gallery, London The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) is an art gallery in London that houses a collection of portraits of historically important and famous British people. When it opened in 1856, it was arguably the first national public gallery in the world th ...

Notes

External links

F. Goedecker
at

{{DEFAULTSORT:Goedecker, Franz Caspar Hugo 1884 deaths 19th-century German artists German caricaturists Vanity Fair (British magazine) artists Year of birth uncertain Emigrants from Bavaria Immigrants to the United Kingdom

Life

Work

See also

Notes

External links