Johann Joachim Faber
(1778 - Hamburg - 1846)

An Arcadian Italianate Landscape
1828

Oil on canvas
Signed and dated lower right I. Faber fec / 1828.

133.9 x 174.6 cm

Provenance:
Munich, Weinmüller, 20 June 1974, lot 910A
Caesar and Ruth Pinnau, Hamburg

Literature:
Ruth I. Pinnau, Eine klassizistische Villa an der Elbe, Hamburg 2002, repr. p.98 (in colour), and p.99

Johann Joachim Faber left his native Hamburg in 1797 to study art in Dresden and Prague. He attended the Vienna Academy from 1802 to 1804 and made his first journey to Italy sometime between 1806 and 1808. His contacts with Joseph Anton Koch and Johann Christian Reinhart stimulated his interest in landscape. The financial support of wealthy patrons enabled him to make a second visit to Italy in 1816. He remained in Italy until 1827, settling in Rome where he specialized in landscape painting. He rented rooms to fellow members of the German artistic community in Rome[1] - Johann Heinrich Schilbach, Heinrich Reinhold and Johann Christian Erhart.

On his visits to Naples and southern Italy[2] Faber captured his impressions in oil studies and drawings, working them up later into large-format oil paintings in his studio in Rome, and later still, in Hamburg. Executed in 1828, the present painting is undoubtedly one of the artist's key works. It impressively conveys the atmosphere of a southern Italian landscape evidently painted when the scene was still fresh in the artist's memory. The meticulous observation of foreground detail and the velvety sfumato of the distant landscape - as envisioned by every traveller on the Grand Tour - testify to Faber's virtuosity in conveying the changing effects of light and atmosphere.

The art historian and collector Ruth Pinnau well describes the mood of the arcadian landscape that Faber has created by melding the ideal and the real as a stille, würdige und heilige Atmosphäre[3] [a calm, dignified and sacred atmosphere]. Closing off the composition in the background is the distant silhouette of Monte Circeo on the Tyrrhenian Sea between Rome and Naples. Faber very probably familiarized himself with the basic theoretical principles of the ideal landscape through his friendship with Johann Christian Reinhart. Reinhart had studied the theoretical writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and was in regular contact with Friedrich Schiller.