Quick Facts
Biography
Adolf Mosengel (1 January 1837 – 12 June 1885) was a landscape painter from Hamburg, Germany. He had built a reputation painting Alpine scenes, and later turned to scenes from Westphalia.
Biography
Mosengel was born in Hamburg. From 1854 to 1857, Mosengel studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Hans Fredrik Gude, and from 1858 to 1859 in Paris. In 1861, he studied in Geneva with Alexandre Calame, before settling in Hamburg. In 1879 he traveled to the lakes of Northern Italy, where he painted en plein air.
In the summer of 1870, Mosengel met Friedrich Nietzsche and his sister, who were spending the season in the Maderanertal, a valley at the northern foot of the Saint-Gotthard Massif which has been compared to the Mount Parnassus. Mosengel and the Nietzsches were staying in the Hotel Alpenclub. The Franco-Prussian War was about to break out, and Nietzsche had been considering joining the Prussian medical corps; apparently Mosengel "strengthened [his] resolve to do so". Besides Leopold Rau, Mosengel is likely the only painter Nietzsche knew personally.