On June 4, 2025, the director of the Brothers Grimm Museum in Kassel, Hesse, Germany, Bernhard Lauer, visited Valga Museum. He was drawn here by his interest in the artist Gerhardt Wilhelm von Reutern (1794–1865), who illustrated the Brothers Grimm fairy tales and was born at Restu Manor.
As a Baltic German nobleman, he had a remarkable military career in his youth during the Napoleonic Wars, serving, among other roles, as an adjutant to Barclay de Tolly. In the Battle of Nations at Leipzig in 1813, he lost his right arm, after which he turned to drawing. In 1814, von Reutern met Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who advised him to take painting seriously. Reutern remained in correspondence with Goethe until the writer's death. A few years after retiring from the military, Reutern met Ludwig Emil Grimm, and together they conceived the idea of founding an artists' colony in Willingshausen. At the same time, Reutern continued his studies with prominent artists and at the Kassel Academy of Art. He also managed to build a career at the Russian Imperial Court, where he achieved the position of court artist with the right to live abroad. Von Reutern's son-in-law was the distinguished Russian poet and imperial family tutor Vasily Zhukovsky. Gerhard Wilhelm von Reutern died in Frankfurt am Main.
Bernhard Lauen arrived in Valga from Tartu, where he had been searching for traces of von Reutern, who, before his military career, had studied at the Imperial University of Tartu. Before visiting Valga Museum, Lauen also managed to explore the Latvian-Valka Local History Museum and visit the local cemetery, where several of von Reutern's relatives are buried.
From Valga Museum, we drove to Restu (Rösthof), where our host was Maie Vill, a former student and later teacher at the Restu school. The guest was particularly interested in the older part of the building, which had once been Restu Manor, the birthplace of von Reutern. The dilapidated building, which has stood empty since 1998, was sad for Lauen to see, yet he still found echoes of its former atmosphere here and there.
We also visited the Sangaste cemetery, where the hostess Anneli Puksov showed us the Reutern family burial plot, which Bernhard Lauen had not previously known about.
The guest continued his journey to Riga, which was once the administrative center of the Governorate of Livonia and where he hoped to find more information about the Reutern family in the archives and knightly documents.
In the photo collage: Bernhard Lauen and Maie Vill in front of the former Restu manor, and Bernhard Lauen and Anneli Puksov at the Reutern family burial site in Sangaste cemetery.
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