Thérèse Glaesener-Hartmann

Biography

The date of her death differs by one day in the records: 18 or 19 February 1923. The place is the same, her native city of Luxembourg, where she spent most of her life.

She was born on 18 April 1858 in Luxembourg, the daughter of Antoine Hartmann (1817–1891), an architect and watercolourist. Hartmann was her maiden name: Marie-Thérèse Hartmann became Glaesener-Hartmann after her marriage. Her father taught her the basics of drawing and painting and supported her work.

At nineteen, in 1877, she went abroad to study and was among the first women from Luxembourg to do so. She spent the first year in Düsseldorf, taking private lessons from Gustav Süs, a painter of animals and genre scenes who also wrote and illustrated children’s books. She then moved to Munich, to the history painter Sándor Liezen-Mayer (Alexander von Liezen-Mayer), and studied with him for two more years. She completed her training in Paris, in the studio for women run by Émile Auguste Carolus-Duran and Jean-Jacques Henner. By some accounts she spent two years in Paris, by others only 1883–1884. Either way, such a long and thorough training was unusual for a young woman from Luxembourg at the time. The academy in Luxembourg did not admit women in those years; they were allowed in only toward the end of the nineteenth century.

She began exhibiting while still a student, at the Galerie Louis Segers in Luxembourg, and found buyers there too. The “Portrait de S.A.R. Madame la Princesse Henri des Pays-Bas” dates from 1879. It apparently did not enter the Luxembourg City collection; why, it is hard to say, and the explanation that the academy was closed to women remains only a guess.

Soon after her return from Paris she married Mathias Glaesener (1858–1924), a jurist and state councillor who later became attorney general. Their daughter was born in 1886. Glaesener-Hartmann did not give up painting.

She painted mainly portraits, in a naturalist manner, and less often still lifes and a few landscapes. She found most of her clients in her own circle, among the families and friends of Luxembourg’s middle and upper classes. Contemporaries valued her work, especially her portraits of men. Her canvases show Prime Minister Paul Eyschen (1841–1915) and the mayor of Luxembourg City, Alphonse Munchen (1850–1917). According to some accounts, the portrait of Eyschen is dated 1916, which would mean it was painted after the sitter’s death; this is hard to verify. From 1894 to 1912 she took part regularly in the exhibitions of the Cercle artistique.

She died in Luxembourg in February 1923. Her paintings are in the National Museum of History and Art and in the Luxembourg City History Museum. A street in the capital is named after her.