14 Part I: Origins
wine-merchants in the vicinity, he soon abandoned the small-townmilieu
and moved together with his wife, Caroline, née Hoffmann (1812–89),
in order to set himself up in a major centre of commerce and free
trade: the city of Frankfurt, with its important trade fairs. In 1864, the
energetic businessman was canny enough to settle in one of the most
favoured residential quarters of Frankfurt. The house, number 7, Schöne
Aussicht, did its owner proud. The four-floor neoclassical building which
contained both the shop and the wine cellar was extremely impressive.
The Schöne Aussicht was part of the old town and hence a purely
residential quarter, free from the noise made by commercial activities
of whatever kind. Nevertheless, Wiesengrund was able to ply his wine-
merchant’s trade in this select area. The house was ideal for his pur-
poses, since to the rear of the building there was a spacious internal
courtyard, and the cellar vault was over 3 metres high.^3 A photograph
from around the turn of the century gives a picture of the shop. Stand-
ing in front of it is the owner, together with three master-coopers
or cellarmen, the latter recognizable by their large leather aprons; the
picture also shows two women workers and two other employees. The
street ran along the north bank of the Main and was generously laid out
and planted with a row of trees opposite a row of bright middle-class
houses. In one of them, number 16, Arthur Schopenhauer had lived
during his years in Frankfurt. Next door Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
had stayed as a guest in July 1836: ‘The view really is enviable,
especially now in the splendid summer weather when you can look
down the River Main with its many cranes, barges and ships, and the
pretty shores over on the other side.’^4 The houses in the Schöne Aussicht
were all more or less on the same scale, but some were occupied by
several families and others by only one. They were built in a modern
style on neoclassical principles: three-storey rendered buildings divided
horizontally by cornices, with tall, narrow windows and an attic. They
were lived in for the most part by merchants, brokers, bankers and
diplomats. It was slightly out of the ordinary for the house next door
to the Wiesengrunds to have belonged to a painter, Friedrich Wilhelm
Figure 1 Bernhard Wiesengrund, wine wholesaler of Frankfurt am Main (estd
1822), extends a hearty invitation to its honoured guests