Johann Christian Kandelhart from Vienna, Austria
This distinguished gentleman was Johann Christian Kandelhart from Vienna, Austria. Or at least, that is how someone has identified him in modern handwriting on the photograph.
The Kandelhart family from Vienna has been researched quite thoroughly by relatives. There are public family trees on FamilySearch, Geneanet and Ancestry, which made my own detective work a lot easier.
Johann Christian Friedrich Kandelhart was born on December 20, 1837, in Vienna, in the Austrian Empire. His parents were Rosina née Kraft and Johann Carl Friedrich Kandelhart. He had an older sister, Anna Maria, born in 1836, and four younger siblings. Sadly, two of them died in infancy.
Our Johann in the found photograoh continued the family tradition and followed in his father's career footsteps. Both Johann and his father Friedrich worked in the gold- and silversmithing trade! His father had come to Vienna from Thuringia, in what is now Germany, although I haven't yet found out exactly when. He married Johann's mother, Rosina, in Vienna in November 1833.
Vienna was an important centre for gold and silver craftsmanship in the 19th century. Goldsmiths and silversmiths made things for the imperial court, the aristocracy, wealthy families, churches, and the wider luxury market.
There were quite a few different specialities within this trade. Goldsmiths and silversmiths, like the Kandelharts, made jewellery, cutlery, vessels, decorative objects, and religious items. Engravers decorated metal surfaces with inscriptions and patterns. Gem setters put diamonds and other gemstones into jewellery. There were also metal casters and craftsmen who made larger silver objects.
Many workshops were small family businesses. Skills and knowledge were often passed down from one generation to the next. It seems that this was also the case in the Kandelhart family.
Interestingly, there was even a historical gold-testing method known as the Kandelhardt method. It appears in 19th-century technical literature about determining the gold content of precious-metal alloys. I haven't found any conclusive evidence that the method was connected to Johann's family, though. Still, I find the possible connection interesting, considering the family's chosen trade.
But back to Johann Christian Kandelhart in the photograph I found.
In the 1860s, Johann, as a young goldsmith, lived in Vienna during a time of great change. The city was transforming itself, and the famous Ringstrasse was being built where the old city fortifications had once stood. The construction of the new Vienna State Opera was underway, the Stadtpark had just opened, and new palaces, shops and residential buildings were appearing all over the city. Vienna was growing, attracting people from across the empire, and becoming an increasingly modern city. Vienna was ruled by Emperor Franz Joseph I and his wife, Empress Elisabeth, better known as Sisi or Sissi. By the 1860s, Vienna's population had doubled since Johann's birth in 1837. By 1869 that number had grown to about 900,000. People were arriving from all over the Habsburg Empire, including Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary and other regions, looking for work and better opportunities.
I find it fascinating to imagine Johann walking through these streets as a young goldsmith, watching his city change while he was starting a family of his own.
In May 1863, Johann married Maria Barbara Wagner. I wonder if Johann designed their wedding rings? Maria Barbara had a profession of her own at the time. She was a Weißnäherin, a woman who sewed white linen and cotton textiles, especially household linen and underwear.
The couple went on to have nine children. Sadly, several of them died as children. I hope Johann found some comfort in knowing that at least one of his surviving sons followed in his footsteps. His firstborn, Friedrich August Kandelhart (1864–1929), continued the family trade of goldsmithing.
I don't know how this family tradition started. Johann's grandfather, Johann Christian Kandelhart Sr., came from Thuringia and worked as a Kantor. This was someone responsible for music in a church or parish. Depending on the setting, a cantor might lead congregational singing, direct a church choir, play the organ, or teach singing or music at a school.
Perhaps the family was related to Heinrich Christian Kandelhardt (1799–1883). He was a German mint official who worked as a Münzwardein, an official responsible for checking the precious-metal content of coins. He later became mint director in Berlin, a position he held from 1858 to 1875. His career would certainly fit with the Kandelharts' line of work. But I haven't found any evidence that they were related. It's just another interesting possibility to investigate!
Our Johann Christian was widowed in 1898, when his wife died at just 55 years old. The years before her death had been heartbreaking for the Kandelhart family. In 1894, they lost their nine-year-old daughter Bertha. Actually, she was the second daughter they had named Bertha. Their first daughter with that name had died at just four years old, about a decade earlier. Then, in 1897, they lost their second-oldest son, Karl Franz, who died in his early thirties. When Johann Christian became a widower in 1898, his youngest child, Karl Kandelhart, was barely ten years old.
And while Johann was dealing with all these personal losses, his city suffered a terrible shock just a few months later. In September 1898, the beloved Empress Sissi, was assassinated in broad daylight in Geneva. The nation was in deep mourning and the love and respect people felt for their their Sissi continued for many years.
When a monument to Elisabeth by Edmund Hellmer was erected in Salzburg in 1901, the gentlemen from the Viennese delegation who attended reportedly thought: “We need something like this in Vienna, too!”
The court jeweller Mayer quickly arranged an audience with the Emperor and obtained permission to establish a committee for the monument. Soon afterwards, on St Elizabeth's Day, November 19, the first public appeal was issued, inviting people to contribute money towards the monument.
The monument was unveiled in 1907. It is located in the heart of Vienna, in the Volksgarten, which is part of the Hofburg complex. The garden in front of the Elisabeth monument is also part of the overall design. Together, they form one of Vienna's largest monument complexes. The Sisi Monument was the first imperial monument to come about through a civic initiative.
Why am I writing about all this in such detail? Because the man in our photograph also donated money towards the monument! I found his name among the donors listed in Wiener Montags-Journal of November 10th, 1902:
What a pity that Johann Christian Kandelhart never got to see the finished monument to Empress Elisabeth. He died in May 1906, just a year before it was unveiled.
He was laid to rest at Matzleinsdorfer Cemetery. He was 68 years old.
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