🗿Louis Sussmann-Hellborn (1828-1908) was a German sculptor, artist, and collector

🗿Louis Sussmann-Hellborn (1828-1908) was a German sculptor, artist, and collector.
Marble
"Sleeping Beauty" (German: "Dornröschen")
1878
Alte Nationalgalerie
Berlin
The name of Hellborn's sculpture seems to have been lost in history, but in 1878, when he created this piece, he was in fact an established artist and a prominent figure in Berlin, with enough money to sponsor the arts (he was one of the founders of the Royal Museum of Decorative Arts) and to create large marble sculptures like this one.
The sweet image of Sleeping Beauty, surrounded by delicate branches of roses, rests in a luxurious marble chair, where the German sculptor Louis-Sussmann Hellborn placed her more than a hundred years ago.
A metal spindle stands out at the girl's feet, reminding us that it was this that led her to this terrible fate. The dress and chair are entwined with roses, because the girl has been sleeping for a century.
While Beauty slept, Germany was awakening from a recent revolutionary act - the unification of Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871.
The "Sleeping Beauty", immortalized by the German Brothers Grimm, was an ideal image. True, the authors of the fairy tale adapted it from the story of the French writer Charles Perrault, who also collected his fairy tale from another author, the Italian Giambattista Basile.
The plot of this memorable tale is taken from numerous folk tales, none of which are German, but Sleeping Beauty remains the heroine of the classic German story, sleeping at the foot of the steps of the National Gallery in Berlin.
Louis Sussmann-Hellborn trained as a sculptor at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts.
He lived and studied in Rome from 1852 to 1856. He traveled to Italy, Germany, France and England, and finally settled in Berlin.
The first major exhibition of his work was organized in Berlin in 1856.
His villa in the Tiergarten was one of the most representative buildings in the area and made him famous in Berlin high society.
In 1875, Arnold Böcklin bought Sussmann Hellborn's painting "Meersidilla" ("Sea Idyll", also known as "Triton and Nereid") for 10,000 marks (it was later in the National Gallery, and has been missing since 1945).
Hellborn was one of the founders of the Royal Museum of Decorative Arts and was also involved in the creation of the sculpture collection in the Royal Museum in Berlin.
From 1882 to 1887, Sussmann-Hellborn headed the Royal Porcelain Manufactory (KPM) in Berlin. Otto Lessing (1846–1912) and he were the only sculptors in the Berlin Association of Architects at the time, which probably had something to do with his work as an excellent sculptor.
He attracted the attention of art critics with his "Drunken Satyr" (1856; located in the Berlin National Gallery), which he created while still in Rome.
He produced several other elegant genre and mythological figures, such as "Italian Woman Braiding Her Hair", "Cupid in Full Armor" and "Abandoned Psyche", and then took up large, monumental sculptures - marble statues of Frederick the Great in old age and Friedrich Wilhelm III (located in the Berlin Town Hall, a repeat of the second - in the city council hall, in Breslau), and in later times again sculpted beautiful genre and allegorical sculptures ("Fisherman with a Flute", "Lyrical Poetry", "Folk Song", "Sleeping Beauty", etc.)
Louis Sussmann-Hellborn was married to the famous beauty Bertha Hellborn.
He died in Berlin and was buried in the Jewish cemetery Schönhauser Allee.

Sources: Pinterest, Flickr, Wikipedia, Pikabu.