"Immanuel Kant"

1852, bronze, 30 cm

Christian Daniel Rauch

1777-1857

a pupil of Gottfried Schadow, Rauch, was considered one of the foremost sculptors of the German School.

Rauch was commissioned in 1852 to create a monumental sculpture of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, to be erected at Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), the capital of East Prussia.

The commission, under Karl Rosenkranz, was finanzed by a public fund-raising drive. The depicted bronze is an early approval model. A later version was approved for the full scale statue (known from photos, destroyed during the war). Small scale copies of the approved version are also in existence.