Johann Heinrich Hoorn (1788–1836)

Born in 1788 in distant Emden, in northwestern Germany, Johann Heinrich Hoorn was a draftsman, lithographer; the creator of architectural landscapes and portraits, in 1813 he settled in Elbląg. He stayed in this city until his death in 1836, working as a drawing teacher at the local Gymnasium. This artist made many landscapes recording the appearance of nineteenth-century Elbląg and its surroundings. Hoorn’s works are known mainly from pencil lithographs, published in cycles in the collaborating publishing houses of August Heinrich Rahnke from Elbląg and the publishing house in Berlin led by Louis Sachse. In the 1830s  the artist published, among others: a two-part (consisting of 24 illustrations) album Erinnerungsblätter an Elbing und die umliegende Gegend presenting views of the city of Elbląg and its vicinity and a series of views entitled Das Schloss Marienburg in seinem Innern und Äußern, showing panoramas of the Malbork castle, its buildings and interiors [fig. 1]. The Malbork album had two editions. The first was developed in the Rahnke publishing house for Prince Aleksander Mikołajewicz (later Tsar Alexander II). The second was dedicated to the heir to the Prussian throne, Frederick William (later Frederick William IV). In 1835, Friedrich Christoph Dietrich (1779-1847) referred to two compositions depicting the vestibule in front of the Grand Master’s chapel and the facade of the Grand Masters’ Palace in a winter robe, illustrating the article Knightly Orders in the “House Museum” by Franciszek Salezy Dmochowski in the technique of woodcut. .

(by J. Lijek)