Painter and sculptor born in Osnabrück, northwest Germany. In 1835, at the age of sixteen, he entered the Hanover Höheren Gewerbeschule where he became a student of the sculptor Ernst von Bandel. On Bandel’s recommendation he transferred the following year to the Munich Kunstakademie where his tutors included Peter von Cornelius and Ludwig Michael von Schwanthaler. During these years he devoted himself almost entirely to painting, his first important commission being a cycle of ceiling paintings for the Hanover Hoftheater. In 1847–48, he travelled to northern Italy, spending much time in Venice where he copied the works of Veronese. In 1853, at the request of Maximilian II of Bavaria, he was appointed director of the Nuremberg Kunstgewerbeschule (a post he held until 1874). In the 1840s, Kreling had discussed with Ferdinand von Miller, director of the Royal Foundry of Bavaria, a design for a grand multi-figure fountain. Although intended for Ludwig I of Bavaria, the design had been rejected and was put to one side until 1867 when Miller brought it to the attention of a visiting American businessman, Henry Probasco, who was looking for just such a fountain for his hometown, Cincinnati, to serve as a memorial to his late brother-in-law and business partner, Tyler Davidson. The Tyler Davidson Fountain was inaugurated in Probasco Place (later Fountain Square) on 6 October 1871. A few years later, the English architect, Charles Barry II, also visited the Royal Foundry, on a mission to find a suitable drinking fountain design for the United Kingdom Temperance and General Provident Institution (UKTGPI). The UKTGPI’s needs and funds being more modest than Probasco’s, Barry selected just one of the supporting groups from Kreling’s grand design, ‘Thirst’, represented by a young woman pouring water from a pitcher into an old man’s drinking bowl. The UKTGPI Drinking Fountain was inaugurated in Adelaide Place on the northern approach to London Bridge, on 28 October 1884. Unfortunately, the site stood over a network of underground warehouses and, the weight of the bronze group and its massive granite base proving too much, the fountain was relocated to Clapham Common, south London, in 1895. Kreling’s public sculptures in Germany include monuments to Prince Heinrich Posthumus Reuß in Gera (1863; destroyed in 1958 when Gera was part of the German Democratic Republic) and to Johannes Kepler, Weil der Stadt, 1870. He married Johanna, a daughter of the painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach, in 1854; the couple had three daughters and two sons, one of whom, Wilhelm Kreling (1855–1937), became a successful painter. August von Kreling was ennobled by Ludwig II of Bavaria in 1873.
Bibliography: T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of South London, Liverpool, 2007, pp. 16, 17, 18, 444; DeWiki.de – August von Kreling.
Terry Cavanagh, October 2024
