Anton Goering

Christian Anton Goering was born on 18 September 1836. Sources agree on the date but not the exact locality, giving either Thonhausen or Schönhaide, both in the Altenburger Land region of what was then the Kingdom of Prussia. He received early artistic training at the school founded by Bernhard von Lindenau in Altenburg, then took a post as preparator and conservator at the Zoological Museum of the University of Halle. From 1860 to 1864 he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture in Leipzig under Hermann Knaur, funded by a Lindenau-Zachsche Stiftung scholarship, and he went on to train in animal illustration in London under Joseph Wolf.

Goering undertook two extended expeditions to South America. The first, from 1856, took him as a companion of the naturalist Hermann Burmeister to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. The second, from 1866 to 1874, was focused on Venezuela. His work there combined botanical, ornithological, and geographic study with landscape painting. He settled in Leipzig around 1874 to 1876 and worked there as a landscape and animal painter, writing, lecturing, and exhibiting. In 1893 he published Vom tropischen Tieflande zum ewigen Schnee, an illustrated account of his travels in Venezuela. In 1883 Duke Ernst I of Saxe-Altenburg granted him the title of Professor, and in 1893 the Duke also awarded him the Saxe-Ernestine House Order; he was also made a corresponding member of the Zoological Society of London.

According to German-language biographical sources, Goering died on 7 December 1905 in Leipzig after a long illness, presumably as a result of a stroke. He was buried in the Johannisfriedhof (Old St. John's Cemetery) in Leipzig.

No exact, attributable critic quotations from major outlets are available in the current research record for Goering. His art-historical recognition rests on his standing as a scientific traveler-painter in the Humboldtian tradition, on his ornithological illustration work connected to the Zoological Society of London and the British Museum, and on the 1883 Professor title and 1893 Saxe-Ernestine House Order granted by Duke Ernst I of Saxe-Altenburg. Museum Burg Posterstein organized a dedicated exhibition, From Germany to South America: The Ornithologist and Painter Anton Goering (1836 to 1905), in 2019, drawing on its own holdings related to his drawings and watercolors.

Goering's auction history is thin, infrequent, and incompletely documented. The best documented realized price found is USD 7,800, paid for the 1880 watercolor Venezuelan Scene at a Morton Kuehnert Auctioneers sale in Houston; the source reporting this result does not give an exact sale date. A 2013 Sotheby's New York lot of Goering watercolors carried an estimate of USD 100,000 to 150,000, but no confirmed sale result for that lot could be verified, so it is not treated as a market data point. Other documented results, tracked through the Lempertz artist index, are lower still, in the range of a few thousand euros for Venezuelan hacienda and tropical landscape subjects, with exact sale dates not given in that source. No repeat-sale index, price trend, or broader annual turnover is documented for the artist, and no currently active gallery or estate manages his market.

Goering's market is small and unevenly documented. The best documented realized price, USD 7,800 for the Morton Kuehnert sale of Venezuelan Scene, is the only clearly sourced high point among a small number of confirmed results, so collectors should treat any single price point with caution rather than as a market average; an unsold 2013 Sotheby's estimate of USD 100,000 to 150,000 for a different lot should not be read as an achieved price. There is no catalogue raisonne and no active gallery or estate representation, so provenance research benefits from cross-reference against Museum Burg Posterstein's collection and 2019 exhibition record, and against the Galeria de Arte Nacional in Caracas. Given the conflicting birthplace sources and the reliance on secondary biographical compilations for details like cause of death, cataloguers should attribute specific claims to their sources rather than treat every biographical detail as settled fact.