Franz Ludwig Catel
(Berlin 1778 - 1856 Rome)
Cape Posillipo, the Salita di Sant'Antonio looking towards the Bay of Naples. With a View of the Park of the Villa Reale, the Promontory of Pizzofalcone, Castel dell'Ovo, in the Left Background Vesuvius and to the Right the Distant Peaks of Castellammare, 1819
Oil on canvas
75 x 101 cm
The painter, draughtsman, watercolourist and etcher Franz Ludwig Catel moved from Berlin to Rome in 1811, where he was to live and work for the rest of his life. His landscapes and genre paintings brought him widespread recognition and considerable worldly success.[1] He studied at the Academy in Berlin from 1794 to 1797 and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1798 to 1800. He was briefly in Switzerland in 1797. Between 1798 and 1806 he produced a large body of illustrations for contemporary German and French almanacs and books. These included works by Goethe, Schiller, Johann Joachim Campe, Johann Heinrich Voss and the French writer Jacques Delille. Catel returned to Paris in 1807 to refine his skills in oil painting. On his arrival in Rome he joined the circle of the Nazarene painters, whom he instructed in perspective drawing. He distanced himself, however, from their religious ideals. His first wife, Sophie Frederike Kolbe, the sister of the artist Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, died in 1810 and he remarried in 1814. His second wife was Margherita Prunetti, the daughter of Michelangelo Prunetti, the Roman art critic and writer. Starting in 1818 the couple began to entertain regularly at their house on the Piazza di Spagna, holding soirées and salons for a large multinational circle of artists, writers, collectors and musicians. One prominent guest was Fanny Mendelssohn. They carried on this tradition for well over 30 years.
On his arrival in Rome Catel began to produce what was to be a highly varied body of work ranging from plein-air oil sketches executed with extraordinary modernity and directness to finished plein-air compositions and genre scenes in landscape settings. He also produced a number of history paintings. Two outstanding examples are titled Rudolf von Habsburg and the Priest and Scenes from the Life of Torquato Tasso.
In 1819, Giuseppe Tambroni (1773-1824), an art critic of Bolognese origin, reported in some detail on two landscape paintings by Franz Ludwig Catel. Tambroni was writing in the cultural review Giornale Arcadico he had founded in Rome in 1814. The two paintings had been commissioned by Lady Mary Anne Acton.[2] Tambroni also mentioned a third painting commissioned from Catel by Lord Bristol.[3] Tambroni's reviews of Catel's most recent work did not stop there. In 1819 he also gave extensive coverage to three newly completed paintings. The praise he lavished on these new works and the amount of detail he devoted to them in his review was exceptional and surprising given that Catel was a German artist working in Italy. In his article Tambroni describes a painting titled View of the Gulf of Salerno,[4] a View of the Campo Vaccino[5] and the present painting:
The first [of the three paintings] is a view of the city of Naples, depicted from the Salita di Sant'Antonio at the point in the foreground of the painting where it [the Salita] forks; so that one sees people ascending on the one side and descending on the other. On the same side [of the painting] one sees a large part of the city of Naples with the Pizzofalcone and Castello [sic] dell'Uovo. At the centre is Vesuvius and further behind, the mountains of Castellammare enclosing the Gulf. Several rustic dwellings surrounded by trees and bushes occupy the area at the left [actually, right] in a very fitting and spirited manner. [6]
Motif, composition and brushwork leave no doubts that an attribution to Catel is reliable. This large-format landscape is a remarkable discovery - in that it has resurfaced at all, that it is firmly attributable and that it should be so exceptional as to justify a very special ranking in Catel's oeuvre. Not only is the painting exceptional in its sophistication, technical virtuosity and compositional stature but the existence of a positive appraisal of its qualities by a contemporary critic at so early a date serves to underline its importance. Tambroni's description is so accurate that - with the exception of the confusion of right and left in his description of the ‘dwellings' - the painting is unequivocally identified and the early dating of 1819 corroborated.
Auction records show that a preparatory oil sketch for the present painting was sold by Hollstein & Puppel in Berlin in 1932.[7] A preparatory oil study on paper has also been identified. It was executed from a similar viewpoint and it too depicts a view of the Gulf of Naples, the Salita di Sant'Antonio and a group of buildings at the right similar to those in the present painting.[8] It displays the typically summary brushwork of a sketch rapidly executed en plein-air. However it was not painted in the bright light of the midday sun - as in the case of the present painting - but in the faint, reddish glow of dawn. This oil study was first published by Daxer & Marschall and Thomas le Claire Kunsthandel in 2004. It is now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (Fig. 1).[9] A direct stylistic comparison of the oil study with the present painting provides important insights into Catel's working methods - from the initial sketch executed sur le motif to the highly finished large-format composition executed in the studio. Catel frequently added, in paintings of this format, elements of luxuriant vegetation not originating in the motif and touches of local colour provided by staffage figures in typical rural dress.
In 1822 Catel addressed the topographical setting of the Salita di Sant'Antonio once again, this time to depict a Neapolitan fruit seller and his family with a donkey on their way to market (Fig. 2). This painting has a small pendant on copper titled Monk in a Carriage in Mergellina Harbour, Naples. This small painting was acquired by Friedrich Wilhelm Hermann Wagener (1782-1861), the Berlin banker and art collector. Both works are now in the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin.[10]
Andreas Stolzenburg
___________________________________________
[1]For details of Catel's biography and oeuvre see Andreas Stolzenburg, Der Landschafts- und Genremaler Franz Ludwig Catel (1778-1856), exhib. cat., Rome, Casa di Goethe, 2007.
[2]Anonymous [Giuseppe Tambroni?], ‘Pittura di Paesi - Cattel Prussiano', in Giornale Arcadico di Scienze, Lettere ed Arte, IV (October, November and December 1819), Rome 1819, pp.103-5. Lady Mary Anne Acton (1786-1873) was born in Naples. She was the wife (and niece) of the Englishman Sir John Francis Edward Acton (1736-1811), a high-ranking political figure in Naples whom she married at the age of 14 in 1800. One of the two Acton paintings (present whereabouts unknown) was a Nocturnal View of the Bay of Naples with Castel dell'Ovo and Vesuvius in the Background. Records show that Catel painted it from a viewpoint on Strada Nuova looking towards Capo Posilippo near the historic Palazzo di Donn'Anna. The other work depicted The Gulf of Naples and Vesuvius Seen from the Substructures of the Palazzo di Donn'Anna. An oil study in the collection of the Casa di Goethe in Rome shows a similar view; oil on paper, 16.3 x 25.3 cm; Stolzenburg 2007, repr. p.8. The two paintings were almost certainly moderate in size and are likely to have been executed as pendants, one depicting day and the other night.
[3]View of Lake Albano from Bosco dei Cappuccini, 1818-19, oil on canvas, 56 x 74 cm. The painting apparently commissioned by Lord Bristol (probably Frederick Hervey, 1st Marquess of Bristol, 1769-1859), as stated in the Giornale Arcadico, is probably identical with the painting now in the collection of the Museum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte der Stadt Dortmund; Von Friedrich bis Liebermann, exhib. cat., Heidelberg, Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, 1999, p.261, no. 13, repr. p.160. - Two paintings by Catel had already been accorded a two-page review in the preceding volume of Giornale Arcadico; anonymous [Giuseppe Tambroni?]: ‘Pittura di Paesi: Catel Prussiano', in Giornale Arcadico di Scienze, Lettere ed Arte, III (July, August and September 1819), Rome 1819, pp.126-7. One of these paintings, a View of Naples from the Road near Vergil's Tomb (whereabouts unknown), was commissioned by Franz von Koller, an Austrian general. The other work was a history painting titled Rudolf von Habsburg and the Priest illustrating a ballad by Schiller. Catel exhibited it in the important exhibition held at the Palazzo Caffarelli in 1819 in honour of a visit by Emperor Franz I to Rome. Although the present whereabouts of the painting are unknown, its basic compositional structure is documented in a number of preparatory studies; Stolzenburg 2007, pp.15-16, note 34; p.17, fig. 5; p.150, nos. 4-5, repr. - Giornale Arcadico published a review of two other important paintings by Catel, one was a painting commissioned by the English painter Sir Thomas Lawrence titled Nocturnal View of Piazza di Monte Cavallo on the Quirinal Hill in Rome (whereabouts unknown) and the other a painting commissioned by Lord Howard titled Neapolitan Serenade by Moonlight, with a View of the Gulf of Pozzuoli (private collection, London); Stolzenburg 2007, p. 64, fig. 35; pp.168-70, nos. 38-41, preparatory studies); [Giuseppe] Tambroni, ‘Pittura di Paesi, Cattel-Prussiano', in Giornale Arcadico di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, XIV (April, May and June 1822), Rome 1822, pp.142-3. - In 1819, Giornale Arcadico reported extensively on a deluxe edition of Vergil's Aeneid translated by Annibale Caro. Richly illustrated with engravings, the book was published on the initiative of Elisabeth Hervey Forster (1759-1824), Duchess of Devonshire. The Duchess had commissioned a series of landscape studies for the engravings from Catel; anonymous [Giuseppe Tambroni?], ‘L'Eneide di Virgilio recata in versi italiani da Annibale Caro: tomo I, Roma nella Stamperia De Romanis 1819. Fol. figurato', in Giornale Arcadico di Scienze, Lettere ed Arte, IV (October, November and December 1819), Rome 1819, pp.378-86; Stolzenburg 2007, pp.31-5.
[4]Whereabouts unknown, no description recorded.
[5]This painting is now lost, however Tambroni's description of it sheds light on its probable appearance. This can be deduced from a preparatory study; oil on paper, 6.9 x 10.7 cm, Kunsthalle Bremen, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. 1937/387; Stolzenburg 2007, p.37, notes 114-5, p.41, fig. 20.
[6]Il primo è il prospetto della città di Napoli tolto dalla salita di S. Antonio, la quale si ripiega in due appunto sul primo piano della diritta del quadro; a tale che si vedono genti chi salire per una parte, e chi discendere per l'altra. Dallo stesso lato si scorge gran parte della città di Napoli, col Pizzofalcone, e castello [sic] dell'Uovo. Nel mezzo è il Vesuvio, e più indietro chiudono il golfo le montagne di Castellammare. Alcune rustiche abitazioni circondate da alberi e da cespugli empiono la parte sinistra [sic; destra] con modo assai pronto e ridente. Giuseppe Tambroni, ‘Belle Arti, Pittura: Catel, di Berlino', in Giornale Arcadico di Scienze, Lettere ed Arte, IV (October, November and December 1819), Rome 1819, p.119.
[7]The Gulf of Naples with Vesuvius, oil on card, 43 x 76 mm (whereabouts unknown), auction cat., Berlin, Hollstein & Puppel, 26. 2. 1932, lot 42, repr. (lot containing four small oil studies).
[8]A drawing by Ernst Fries executed on 30 June 1826 depicts the same group of buildings; Neuere Deutsche Handzeichnungen [...], Leipzig, C. G. Boerner, auction sale 195, 19.6.1937, p.4, lot 27, plate X.
[9]Romanticism and Nature. A selection of 19th century paintings and oil sketches, Munich, Daxer & Marschall Kunsthandel and Hamburg, Thomas le Claire Kunsthandel, 2004, pp.14-15, repr.; Stolzenburg 2007, p.59, fig. 31.
[10] Stolzenburg 2007, p.60, fig. 32; Die Sammlung des Bankiers Wagener. Die Gründung der Nationalgalerie, exhib. cat., Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie, 2011, pp.19-20, nos. 35-36, repr. (fully illustrated reprint of G. F. Waagen's catalogue of the Wagener Collection, Berlin 1861).