August Piepenhagen
(Soldin/Brandenburg 1791 - 1868 Prague)

Mountain Landscape with a Wanderer
1826

Oil on panel
Signed and dated lower left A. Piepenhagen 1826

38.8 x 31 cm

I have known you for nigh on twenty years. I made your acquaintance through some small paintings you were showing at an exhibition in Vienna and since encountering them I have come to know and love your work. Henceforward I have never let you out of my sight ... Your paintings are unique in their atmospheric quality. They linger before our eyes in the extreme delicacy of their essence, spurning the intrusiveness of the market crier and faithfully capturing each profound nuance that nature commends to us. (Adalbert Stifter to August Piepenhagen, 1859)[1]

The National Gallery in Prague recently staged an exhibition featuring the work of the Romantic landscape painter August Piepenhagen and his daughters Charlotta and Louisa.[2] The catalogue of the exhibition provides an overview of the extensive output of these three artists. Both daughters built on the artistic heritage of their father, working in his style through to the end of the nineteenth century and benefitting from the continuing international demand for his work,[3] August Piepenhagen himself emerges as a highly inventive painter who, although self-taught, graduated to become an artist with his own highly pictorial language. A fervent admirer of Piepenhagen's work was the writer, poet and painter Adalbert Stifter. The two men corresponded regularly. It was through Stifter that Piepenhagen gained access to art-theoretical and aesthetic opinions that would otherwise have remained unavailable to an artist without formal training.[4] Stifter visited Piepenhagen a number of times at his summer house in Jenerálka on the outskirts of Prague, where Piepenhagen was to die in 1868.

Piepenhagen was born into a poor family and began his working life as an apprentice to a haberdasher. As a journeyman he visited Switzerland. Here, his perception of the magnificence of the Alpine scenery inspired him to take up painting and sketching. A brief period of tuition in Zurich followed, probably under the guidance of the landscape painter Johann Heinrich Wuest. In Switzerland Piepenhagen encountered the idyllic classicism of Salomon Gessner and familiarized himself with the work of the circle of artists associated with the important Swiss engraver and maker of vedute J. L. Aberli. Continuing on his travels, Piepenhagen arrived in Prague in 1811. It was here that he settled. His first exhibitions brought him rapid recognition as a landscape painter. He devoted himself to the study of Dutch seventeenth-century landscape painting which was well represented in public collections in Prague. The paintings of his mature period display an emotional and subjective response much like that of his friend Adalbert Stifter to the experience of nature in all its fleeting moods.

Piepenhagen loved to experiment. He frequently varied the texture of the ground in order to achieve painterly effects. In the present painting he added sand to the ground creating a grainy effect that was designed to alter the way the light refracts on the surface of the paint.

We are grateful to Dr. Šárka Leubnerová, National Gallery in Prague, for her assistance in the preparation of this catalogue entry.

[1] Ich kenne Sie schon gegen zwanzig Jahre. Ich lernte Sie durch kleine Bilder, die Sie auf einer Wiener Ausstellung hatten, kennen und lieben. Seitdem verlor ich Sie nie aus den Augen...Ihre Gemälde sind unvergleichlich an Stimmung. Im zartesten Dufte Ihrer Ganzheit schweben Sie vor den Augen, jedes Marktschreien vordringender Wirkungen verschmähend, aber dafür jeden innigen Zwischenton, welchen die Natur befiehlt, getreulich bringend. See Brigitte Hauptner, '...unvergleichlich an Stimmung... Die künstlerische Beziehung zwischen Adalbert Stifter, August Piepenhagen und Carl Blumauer', in Kunstjahrbuch der Stadt Linz, 1996-7, p.54-86 and p.54.
[2] Nadĕžda Blažíčková-Horová (ed.), August Bedřich, Charlotta a Louisa Piepenhagenovi, exhib. cat., National Gallery in Prague, Prague 2009. One of the first retrospectives was staged at the same venue in 1961.
[3] Piepenhagen is known to have sent out something of a pattern book to his clients. They then selected a motif and specified the dimensions of the painting. He delivered the completed work. These pattern books were based on drawings he had made on his travels. The National Gallery in Prague holds no less than 250 of these drawings. They are of small format, each with several rapidly sketched motifs. Records show that Piepenhagen travelled to Belgium, Germany and France. Although some of his paintings depict Italian views there is no evidence he had ever visited Italy.
[4] See Brigitte Hauptner, '...unvergleichlich an Stimmung...', op. cit., p.54-86.