Design and Art Australia Online

painter, Egyptologist and settler, was the fifth of at least seven sons of a drawing master at Naumburg in Thuringia, Prussia. After completing his primary schooling, Maximilian left Naumburg for further education and by April 1839 had begun tertiary studies in Berlin under the eminent Egyptologist Richard Lepsius, another native of Naumburg. As part of his studies he copied the 57 foot (17.3 m) long Egyptian Death Book in Turin, Italy. Seventy-nine plates from his copy were published in Lepsius’s Das Todtenbuch der alten Aegypter in 1842 and subsequently commended by the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie : 'Because Maximilian was himself proficient in the reading and writing of hieroglyphical signs his productions of old Egyptian script and art have an unsurpassable beauty and purity of style’.

Maximilian and his brother Ernst, a less skilled illustrator, were appointed artists on Lepsius’s official expedition to Egypt in 1842-45, sponsored by Friedrich Wilhelm IV at Alexander von Humboldt’s instigation. Their task was to copy hieroglyphic inscriptions and sketch the general terrain. For the former they invented a special 'abbreviated pictorial script’ which formed the basis for subsequent Egyptian type-faces printed in Berlin. Their work was widely featured in scholarly texts, including the twelve-volume Die Denkm ä ler aus Aegypten und Nubien . On the triumphant return of the expedition, Weidenbach was appointed to the Royal Museum at Berlin and spent three years painting hieroglyphic murals in the Egyptian Rooms.

The second eldest Weidenbach brother, August Friedrich, a coach-builder and engineer, had migrated to South Australia in 1846. After working in the notorious Glen Osmond tin mines, he began farming in the Hope Valley district. The youngest brother, Julius, joined him in South Australia in 1847 but died on 6 February 1848. Then the eldest brother, Moritz, came to South Australia in March 1848 with his wife, two sons, and a daughter born on the voyage. Three other brothers followed, including Maximilian (Max) aboard the Australia on 12 September 1849. His reputation had preceded him and he was immediately appointed the first Prussian consul in South Australia, retaining this position until 1855.

A watercolour sketch of Glen Osmond in 1849 from the Chimney Hill showing the Miners’ Arms Hotel was drawn by Max Weidenbach soon after his arrival and was later reproduced in Thomas Gill’s History and Topography of Glen Osmond (Adelaide 1905). Max encouraged the miners to desert the mines and quarries of South Australia (where he believed they were exploited) for the Victorian goldfields and he and Moritz themselves went gold-mining at Ballarat in 1852, returning to Glen Osmond with enough capital to build a house and take up viticulture. He continued to ally himself with members of the German community who were inciting the miners to strike in order to improve conditions and pay, and he encouraged the formation of 'friendly societies’ and other working-class self-help groups, hoping, in particular, to provide free secular education for working-class children. As a result of their efforts a government school was opened at Glen Osmond in 1859.

When assisted migration was resumed in 1872 Weidenbach hired premises in Fisher Place, Adelaide, and set up as an agent for the scheme. He was also on the committee of the 'Süd Australischer Allgemeiner Deutscher Verein, a German society open to all classes of migrants which he had helped to found in 1863. Increasingly, however, he spent his time managing the Macclesfield estate of his deceased brother Moritz (d.1858) and supporting Moritz’s family. He gradually converted the estate into a vineyard and thus became involved in the wine industry. By the 1870s the Weidenbach family had extensive business interests throughout the colony.

On 9 February 1882, the German warship Carola arrived at Adelaide (among some consternation) in order to bring Weidenbach back to Berlin for a reunion of the Lepsius expedition members. Weidenbach left on 22 February, taking with him numerous sketches and paintings he had made of the South Australian countryside and its Aboriginal inhabitants, a collection of Aboriginal artefacts and a treatise on Aboriginal folklore and languages. This material was dispersed and cannot now be located. Weidenbach returned to South Australia on board the Siam , reaching Glenelg on 5 February 1883. He died on 24 August 1890 and was buried in Glen Osmond Cemetery.

At the sixth exhibition of the South Australian Society of Arts in January 1863 Weidenbach had been among the artists who submitted a design for the society’s medal (won by Minchin ), but few other records and no examples of his art have been located. His South Australian work therefore can be judged only from the two illustrations attributed to him in Gill’s History and Topography of Glen Osmond (and one seems to be from a photograph not an original drawing). Although his sketches were reproduced in the local German newspaper, Adelaider Illustrierte Zeitung , all known copies of this were destroyed during the First World War.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011