Heroic Landscape (Gottfried Keller)
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| Heroic landscape |
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| Gottfried Keller , 1842 |
| Oil on canvas |
| 88.7 x 118.3 cm |
| Central Library Zurich |
Heroic Landscape is the current title of a painting by the Swiss poet Gottfried Keller (1819–1890). The twenty-one year old Keller, who wanted to become a landscape painter , completed it during his study stay at the Munich Royal Academy of Arts in May 1842. The picture was lost for almost 60 years, was acquired by the Gottfried Keller Foundation after its rediscovery in 1919 and is now in the reading room of the Zurich Central Library . Keller's painting does not represent the classic heroic landscape , but represents a late modification.
description
A strangely defiant rock massif rises up from a wide coastal landscape, crenellated like a castle. His foot, clad in heather and sparse bushes, stretches along a lake and is bathed in friendly sunlight, while his crown remains darkly shaded by heavy clouds. In the foreground are rock debris with bushes and weathered tree stumps. In between, a path follows the sloping terrain, first in the shade, then in the light, and loses itself in a low deciduous forest that extends to the shore of the lake (or inlet). Beyond the water stretches a pine forest, behind which the torn coastline with cliffs and the distant sea horizon become visible. In the sky above, huge cumuli pile up tightly . A distant bank of clouds gleams light gray, almost white. The rays of light that fall on the heather, the path and the lake point to gaps in the dark drift of clouds that cannot be seen by the earthbound observer.
Comments and ratings
The Zurich history painter Ludwig Vogel (1788–1879) on the occasion of the first exhibition of the painting in Zurich in 1842 about the artist's mother:
- I can tell you with pleasure that I like the whole thing very much except for the air - the clouds are much too heavy and too thick, they should be much lighter and cleaner. Notice this to him when you write! Otherwise the picture reveals a lot of comprehension and inventiveness. I can tell you that I did not expect this from him. I was very surprised when looking at the picture, etc. I hope that he will be able to deliver nice things later!
The Viennese history and genre painter Leo Bernhard Eichhorn in a report from 1920:
- When I saw this picture by Gottfried Keller for the first time, I was surprised by its high painterly qualities. Not only the grandiose composition, but also the execution filled me with amazement. Nothing of the brown-sappy nature of that time: fine, silvery gray tones tuned to perfect harmony of the values, in short, as painting an excellent work in itself. If GK had continued to paint, he would have to be named as an important painter of his time in a row with Preller and Rottmann .
The Swiss art historian Paul Schaffner in Gottfried Keller as a painter in 1923:
- Compared to previous and contemporary works, this composition offers a surprise. There is hardly a bridge to be built from the small world of the idyllic to this pathetic decorative piece.
The Zurich art historian Bruno Weber 2005:
- Keller's “Heroic Landscape” is an astonishing portrait of opposites. Heroic and idyllic at the same time, a landscape of sublime, final character, serious and majestic, but sunnier and inspired for a peaceful existence, designed as a dwelling place for superhuman beings, or in the sense of Goethe's definition "for a human race with few needs and great attitudes" .
Image title and meaning
In the catalog of the Zurich art exhibition of June 1842, for which the picture was painted and at which it was shown to the public for the first time, it figured simply as a “landscape composition”. With " Composition " was no more, and no less said than that the picture is not painted from nature, not a reflection of a real landscape, but a product of artistic imagination was thus an idealization represented.
After its rediscovery, Keller's picture became known as the "Ossian landscape". This type of primeval, wild, melancholy ideal landscape goes back to a literary model, the poems of the Scotsman James Macpherson , which the latter passed off as translations from Gaelic in 1760 and ascribed to the Irishman Ossian , a bard from pre-Christian times. Ossian's complaints about the downfall of the ancient heroic families and his portrayal of grieving nature matched the Weltschmerz of the beginning romanticism and nourished the imagination of several generations of European poets, painters, musicians and archaeologists; so also the Goethe and his characters in the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther . Heinrich Lee, main character of Keller's autobiographical novel The Green Heinrich paints “Ossian or Nordic mythological desert areas, between whose rock paintings and gnarled oak groves you could see the line of the sea on the horizon, gloomy heath pictures with enormous clouds in which a lonely grave protruded.” The term “Ossian “It was therefore an obvious choice for Keller's exhibition image and major painting, although the term no longer appears in the final version of the novel. This was published in 1879/80, at a time when the enthusiasm had long since waned and the name Ossian no longer aroused the old associations. He became "in realism a symbol of enthusiastic youth attitudes".
The painter Keller, inexperienced in figure drawing, dispensed with staffage in his picture . The mythological or biblical inhabitants of the classic heroic landscape are missing, as are the lonely, heroic or elegiacly posing nature viewers of Romanticism. All the more urgently, the deserted landscape invites the viewer to settle in it and to change his needs and attitudes accordingly. - The title “Heroic Landscape” suggested by Bruno Weber in 1979 stuck and has been in use ever since.
History of origin and whereabouts
A first small-format preliminary study in pencil can be found in one of Keller's sketchbooks. Keller then carried out a design in black chalk, sepia and opaque white, which differs from the oil painting only in a few details.
According to Bruno Weber, when designing the landscape, Keller was inspired by a steel engraving of the sacred mountain Tabor published in Meyer's Universum in 1836 .
In the fall of 1841, a year and a half after his arrival in Munich, Keller began to work with oil. The following May he hopefully sent the finished painting to his hometown Zurich for the annual art exhibition there. It arrived late and was initially not shown due to the negligence of the exhibition management. Keller's mother discovered it in a junk room and worked to have it transported from there to the exhibition rooms. Besides Ludwig Vogel, other exhibition visitors also praised the work of the still completely unknown young man. But it never occurred to anyone to buy it, especially since the note with the price set by Keller (15 Louisdor) was found too late.
In the same summer, the picture traveled from Zurich to painting exhibitions in Basel and Bern , but did not find a buyer there either. In late autumn it returned to Munich with a ruined frame, one day before Keller left home: “It was ragged up; I am amazed that the haughty and distinguished gentlemen of art patrons in Switzerland are not ashamed of bringing a young fellow and poor devil out of his way. "
Keller, who had been forced to break off his stay in Munich due to poverty and who had had to take a large part of his artistic possessions to the second-hand dealer there, left the picture with his landlord, to whom he still owed rent, and negotiated it for less from Zurich than half of the set price to a stranger. Only the chalk drawing remained in his possession and ended up in the Zurich Central Library with the cellar estate. The oil painting, which after its condition had passed through skilled hands when it was found, was offered for sale privately in Vienna in 1919 . From there, it passed into the possession of the Gottfried Keller Foundation in 1920 for the purchase price of 10,000 Swiss francs.
Individual evidence
- ^ Letter from Elisabeth Keller to her son dated July 8, 1842. In: Carl Helbling (Ed.): Gottfried Keller. Collected letters . 4 volumes. Bern 1950, vol. 1, p. 81 f.
- ↑ Quoted from Bruno Weber: Gottfried Keller's “Heroic Landscape”. The painting and its history , p. 145 f.
- ↑ p. 120.
- ↑ Gottfried Keller's “Heroic Landscape” , p. 140. Weber quotes the definition of the heroic landscape from Goethe's book Artistic Treatment of Landscape Objects from 1831.
- ↑ See Jakob Baechtold : Gottfried Keller's life. His letters and diaries . 3 volumes. Wilhelm Hertz , Berlin 1894–1897, vol. 1, p. 179 note.
- ↑ So titled by Paul Schaffner, pp. 112–128.
- ^ The green Heinrich , first version (1853–1855), third volume, fourth chapter (basement homepage of Walter Morgenthaler).
- ↑ Wolf Gerhard Schmidt: "Homer of the North" and "Mother of Romanticism". James Macpherson's Ossian and its reception in German-language literature . Berlin and New York 2003, vol. 1, p. 8.
- ↑ A twin pine grows on the summit of the rock massif and two menhirs stand on the heather at its foot .
- ↑ p. 140.
- ↑ Keller to his mother, letter of November 21, 1842, Helbling, vol. 1, p. 86.
literature
- Paul Schaffner: Gottfried Keller as a painter . JG Cotta's successor. Stuttgart and Berlin 1923.
- Bruno Weber: Gottfried Keller's “Heroic Landscape”. The painting and its history . In: Green Heinrich. CVs between failure and success. Johann Gottfried Steffan and the Swiss Painters in Munich 1840–1890 . Edited by Adrian Scherrer. Stäfa 2005, pp. 134-46, ISBN 3-85717-163-4 . (Catalog of the exhibition of the same name from 2005 in Pfäffikon and Wädenswil CH).
Web links
- Heroic landscape in Sikart
- Gallery and directory of paintings , Gottfried Keller estate in the Zurich Central Library