1. In July, I published a long article on the biography of the collector of Sinaitic manuscripts Friedrich Grote (1861-1922).1 Grote can be described as one of the most underestimated manuscript collectors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He played a central role in the dispersion of the handwritten cultural heritage of St Catherine’s Monastery. Investigating his biography – about which almost nothing was known until then – was probably the research project in which I have invested the most work to date and the research for it took me almost eight years (friends started to refer to it as my “secret” PhD thesis). Nevertheless, just after the article was completed, new sources emerged that I was no longer able to take into account. I wrote a post about this back in October 2023. But I didn’t expect that even more material would surface shortly afterwards. I would like to document these sources in this and two subsequent posts.

2. The written sources that came to my attention – two letters by Grote and a travel diary of one of his friends – provide interesting new details and even shed light on a previously obscure point in Grote’s biography. In this short post, however, I want to turn to two photographic sources. They have already been published in two books that gather biographical material on Ludwig Heinrich Grote (1825-1887), Friedrich’s father.2 The author of these books is Claus H. Stumpff, a great-great-grandson of Ludwig Grote and great-nephew of Friedrich Grote. I could already draw on one of these photographs for my biography. Now, Claus Stumpff has also generously made the original of this and one further photograph available to me for digitisation and public domain use. I would like to express my sincere thanks to him for this and his support during my research.
3. Regarding the provenance of these materials, it should be noted that they originally came from the estate of Margarethe Bickel (née Grote, 1866-1944), a sister of Friedrich, who was also involved in the sale of Sinaitic manuscripts. Margarete Bickel passed the materials on to her niece, the writer and translator Gertrud Grote (1899-1986), and Gertrud in turn passed them to her sister Elisabeth Stumpff (née Grote), who kept them in Göttingen until 1975. Claus Stumpff informed me that after moving away from Göttingen, his mother Elisabeth also passed on a collection of “glass plate negatives of the ‘Africa explorer’ (Afrikaforscher) Friedrich Grote” to an unknown person.3 This was presumably connected to the photographs that were sold through Zwiggelaar Auctions at the end of 2022 (see my first post). However, these were prints and not glass plates. Still, these prints were very likely made on the basis of glass plates that were in the collection mentioned by Stumpff. As I have already noted, the initials of Friedrich Grote can be seen on one of the photos.
4. A photographer has also left his signature in one of the photos published below (fig. 2). This was Fred Boissonnas (1858-1946), who took a family portrait of the Grotes in 1881 in his atelier in Geneva. Boissonnas later became known above all for his photographs of Greece. I think it is very likely that he may have had an influence on Grote’s own photographic ambitions. We see him in this image at the age of 20 as a young student.

5. The second photo was taken in 1872 (fig. 3). It shows Friedrich Grote with his mother and five of his younger siblings. He was about eleven years old at the time and this is the oldest surviving photograph of him. It is no coincidence that the image does not make a happy impression. His father was in prison the third time and the photo was probably taken for the absent family head.

6. The portrait of Friedrich Grote shown above (fig. 1) was also published by Stumpff. However, he was only able to send me the digital copy and, according to him, the original is no longer in his possession.4 At this point, I would like to emphasise once more that my ongoing project on the diaspora manuscripts of Sinai, their provenance and collection histories, and the people and networks involved in their dispersion, is committed to the ideas of Open Access, Open Scholarship, and Open Education. For this reason, I am publishing these open notes here. With reference to the topic of this post, I have now also created a Wikipedia page for Friedrich Grote, on which this image material will hopefully also be deposited soon. Anyone who can and would like to contribute is invited to help shape this Wikipedia page.
Published: 14 October 2024. Last updated: 15 October 2024. Licence: CC BY-NC 4.0. Download PDF
- Peter Tarras, “Friedrich Heinrich Ludwig Grote (1861-1922) und die christlich-orientalischen Diasporahandschriften vom Sinai: Biographie eines Sammlers”, Oriens Christianus, 106 (2023 [2024]), pp. 209-280. If you would like to read the article, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. [↩]
- Claus H. Stumpff, Der Welfenpastor Ludwig Grote 1825–1887: Hannoverscher Freiheitskämpfer und Bismarck-Gegner, Gröbenzell: CHS Buch, 2017; idem, Theologe und Publizist Ludwig Grote 1825-1887: Ein Leben zwischen Kirche, Politik, Freiheitsentzug und Familie, Gröbenzell: CHS Buch, 2018. [↩]
- All information based on personal communication from 26 April and 1 May 2024. [↩]
- Personal communication from 2 May 2024. [↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Peter Tarras (October 14, 2024). New Materials on Grote (Part 2). Membra Dispersa Sinaitica. Retrieved February 11, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12hm6