German immigrant Jacob Maentel painted more than two hundred portraits of friends and neighbors in southeastern Pennsylvania and Indiana. Adding a unique and personal dimension to the rich legacy of Germanic culture in America, his watercolors provide a window into the homes of his community and the lives of its people. Maentel’s own life has been more challenging to untangle and has attracted the work of generations of folk art scholars.
Johann Adam Bernhard Jacob Maentel was born in Kassel, Germany, on October 15, 1778, and was baptized on October 25. He was the son of Frederich Ludwig Maentel, “beadle of the illustrious principal post office,” and Elizabeth Krügerin. He may have immigrated to Baltimore sometime between his father’s death in 1805 and the appearance of a Jacob Maentel, “Portrait painter,” in the Baltimore directory of 1807. Maentel married Catherine Weaver of Baltimore about 1821, but he may already have been living or traveling in Pennsylvania by about 1807, based on portraits of subjects in Dauphin, Lebanon, and York Counties. From September 1, 1814, to March 1, 1815, “Jacob Mantell” of Lancaster served in the Second Regiment of the Second Brigade of the Pennsylvania Militia under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Lutz at York. He was paid $6.00 for this service and was naturalized a short time later, in York County.
In 1816, Maentel was sketched by Lewis Miller in his visual chronicles of York County; however, a second, older Jacob Maentel, identified as a confectioner, was also sketched at the same time. Adding to the confusion is the presence of the older Maentel in Indiana, after the artist was settled there, as well as references to the artist’s wife as a confectioner. In 1820, Maentel is listed in the census for Dauphin County, where he painted many subjects standing in grassy landscapes. By 1830, he was living in Schaefferstown, Lebanon County, where two of his children were born and where his name appears with many of his subjects—Zimmerman, Bucher, Haak—in the parish register of the Saint Luke’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. His name also appears until 1833 in the Zimmerman ledger books for purchases of paint and confectioners’ supplies. But by 1838, Maentel is listed in the Indiana tax rolls for New Harmony Township, where he continued to portray members of the tight-knit German community, some of whom he had known in Pennsylvania. Maentel is buried in Maple Hill Cemetery in New Harmony; his undated headstone bears only the initials “J.M.”
The encompassing dates of Maentel’s identified watercolors are 1807 to 1846, with only four signed examples, including the portrait in the museum’s collection of a young woman in a blue dress, dated August 31, 1827, and signed “von Jacob Mäntel.” In addition to the important visual record they provide, Maentel’s portraits are notable for their detailing of faces, dress, and backgrounds. Fine and distinct ink strokes delineate brows and lashes, while heavier washes indicate drapery and landscape elements. The watercolors fall into several stylistic categories of pose and setting. The portraits, from about 1810 through 1820, are full-length figures set in landscapes and standing in profile silhouetted against plain backgrounds or dramatic skies. Usually there are tufts of grass in the foreground, and Maentel later began to include architectural structures, fences, and other narrative elements. Overlapping this period are pairs of frontal figures set into colorful interiors. By the mid-1820s, these symmetrical companion portraits had become Maentel’s typical presentation, and he continued to reuse these established conventions in Indiana.
