Hugo Höppener dropped out of art school in 1887 to
join the vegetarian and nudist
commune of Bavarian painter-philosopher, Karl Diefenbach.
Within a few
weeks, police raided the place. Charged with nude sunbathing,
young Höppener
cheerfully went to jail for eight days, before the judge dismissed him for lack
of an offended complainant. Other commune members slunk away,
but he
stayed. After the jail episode, Diefenbach referred to him as
Fidus—Latin for "the
faithful one." For the rest of his life, the artist signed
his works Fidus-- even after
he had attracted his own flock of disciples.
Two years after the arrest, he went back to art
school. But the memory of the happy nude
Diefenbach children gamboling in the sunshine had already supplied him subject-matter
for the next twenty years. To illustrate a page of
Diefenbach's philosophical
fairy tales, he indulged the popular fad for silhouettes-- something
that worked well on the black-and-white printing press.
His were lively silhouettes, much in demand by publicizers of
the new nudist
movement in Germany and soon the rest of Europe. The
once-popular artist has
been nearly forgotten today--except among nudists who keep re- using his
delightful designs.
The Naturist Society has long utilized his silhouette of two
boys, two girls, and
a younger child startling a duck as they leap in for a
skinny-dip. The triangular
composition unifies the strong horizontals and verticals of the design.