Joseph Anton Koch
(Obergiblen 1768 - 1839 Rome)
The Ruins of the Imperial Palaces seen from the Palatine Hill
1806/1808
Pencil and chalk with white heightening
On buff paper with a Bracciano watermark in a cartouche
42.5 x 57.8 cm
Signed lower left Coch
Literature:
Christian von Holst, Joseph Anton Koch - Beobachtungen und Ergänzungen, in: Römische Historische Mitteilungen Nr. 52/2010, with ill.
We would like to thank Professor Christian von Holst who has seen the original drawings for his authentication.
The draughtsman, etcher and painter Joseph Anton Koch is seen as the leading artistic innovator of his time. A highly versatile artist, his main interest lay in landscape painting. The work of the French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and the German history painter Jacob Asmus Carstens (1754-1798) had a formative influence on his artistic career. Study of their œuvre was instrumental in the development of his own pictorial vocabulary and landscape theories. In this, he moved from a purely ideal concept of landscape to a 'heroic' interpretation. He turned his attention in particular to the landscapes of Rome and its surroundings.[1] In 1803, he began to travel widely in the Roman Campagna. Numerous sketchbooks detail his exhilarated response to the artistic potential of these landscapes.[2]
On stylistic grounds, the present sheets are related to a group of drawings executed in 1806-10. The group served as preliminary studies for the set of twenty etchings titled Radierungen Römischer Ansichten published by Koch in 1810.[3] His earlier sketches and preliminary studies served as the basis for precisely structured, painterly drawings of Rome and its surroundings. Staffage was added to these compositions. The group also includes an almost identical version of A View of Rome with the Colosseum. Dated 1808, this sheet is now in the collection of the Angermuseum in Erfurt.[4]
Perspective plays a major role in the design of both images. The foreground of both lies in the shadow of bushes and trees. It is drawn in firm, dark lines of hatching. The blackness of the hatching accentuates the contrast between the foreground, the pale, rather delicate architecture of the middle ground and elements such as the misty silhouettes of the distant peaks on the horizon. In the sheet titled Ruins of the Imperial Palaces seen from the Palatine Hill the tonal interplay created by Koch's skilful handling of the different compositional elements - ruins, hills and trees - is subtle and highly complex.
He integrates with a masterly hand a highly detailed interpretation of nature into a landscape composition depicting the essential elements of the topography. Staffage figures are used sparingly and unobtrusively integrated into the natural surroundings, but with a distinctly Arcadian touch.
In his landscapes, Koch did not set out to reproduce the precise topography of natural sites - as in Jakob Philipp Hackert's vedute (1737-1807) - nor did he intend to introduce a Romantic flavour into his landscapes in the manner of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). His landscapes are to be interpreted as 'ideas of landscape' based on a meticulous study of nature.[5]
[1] Koch first arrived in Rome in early 1795. He joined the Deutsch-Römer, an informal group of German artists working in Rome. He was to remain in Rome permanently, leaving the city only once on a three-year visit to Vienna in 1812. Carstens was one of his closest friends. He studied Poussin's work from engravings. He executed his first ideal landscapes in 1796-9 using predominantly brown tones in sepia and bistre. See Otto R. von Lutterotti, Joseph Anton Koch. 1768-1839. Leben und Werk. Mit einem vollständigen Werkverzeichnis, Vienna 1985, p. 40.
[2] On a walking tour in the Sabine Hills in 1804 he discovered the hilltop village of Olevano and found it to be an ideal subject for landscape painters; see Lutterotti, op. cit., p. 51.
[3] Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie, Graphische Sammlung. See Lutterotti, op. cit., pp. 59ff. and pp. 403f., figs. 232, 234-5, 238, 241, 243; Christian von Holst, Joseph Anton Koch 1768 - 1839, Ansichten der Natur, exhib. cat., Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, 1989, p.15 and nos. 83-92; Asmus Jakob Carstens und Joseph Anton Koch. Zwei Zeitgenossen der Französischen Revolution, exhib. cat., Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, December 1989 - February 1990, p. 135.
[4] Compare:
-Lutterotti, op. cit., p. 242, fig. 172 = Z 242, p.332, View of Rome with the Colosseum, 1808, pencil, white heightening on brown paper, signed and dated lower left: Coch 1808, 42.5 x 57.5 cm (dimensions given by the Angermuseum differ: 43 x 57.5), Angermuseum Erfurt, inv. no. 3561
-Lutterotti, op. cit., p.242, fig.171 = Z 143, p.386, The Baths of Titus and S. Maria Maggiore, c.1805-10, pen and ink, 23.8 x 33.8 cm
-Lutterotti, op. cit., p.364, Z 593 and fig. 178 = Z637, p. 363, 178 and Z 154, p. 327
-Holst, op. cit., p. 215, no. 76, fig. 143, Heroic Landscape with a Rainbow, 1806, pencil, 53.7 x 43.3 cm, Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Graphische Sammlung, inv. no. HZ 3210.
[5] See Andreas Andresen, Die deutschen Maler-Radierer (Peintres-Graveurs) des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts nach ihrem Leben und Werk, I, Hildesheim 1971, pp. 9-30.
