(Vienna 1803–1887)
A Vast Idealised Landscape with Antique Figures around a Double Statue of Mars and Venus, Temple Architecture in the Background, oil on canvas, 111 x 185.5 cm, damaged, framed

Provenance:
Dorotheum Vienna, Estate of Friedrich von Amerling, 3 May 1916, lot 44;
Private Collection Austria;
Dorotheum, Vienna, 12 September 2012, lot 223;
thence Private Collection, Austria.

Catalogued in:
Günther Probszt, Friedrich von Amerling. Der Altmeister der Wiener Portraitmalerei, Zurich/Leipzig/Vienna 1927, p. 145, no. 914.

We are grateful to Dr. Sabine Grabner, Belvedere for her confirmation on the basis of the original.

Künstlerhaus label 1898/3951 confirmed by Mag. Nikolaus Domes.

In 1856, the great portrait painter Friedrich von Amerling, who was able to capture the special character of a face in an inimitable way, turned to landscape painting, in an intriguing twist. He was not interested in reproducing impressions of nature: instead, he wanted to explore classical pictorial themes such as the romantic, heroic or Arcadian landscape. This is how he produced his Heroic Landscape, today in the Belvedere Collection inventory number Lg 41, a medium-sized vertical format with a knight’s castle atop a steep cliff bathed in dramatic, gloomy lighting. It is also how he produced the idealised landscape shown here, drawing on antique motifs. Working in a monumental horizontal format, Amerling unfolds a serene, Arcadian scene in a southern region, featuring Doric temple architecture reminiscent of Selinunte or Segesta in Sicily. The double statue of Mars and Venus in the middle ground seems to set the tone for the relaxed atmosphere, in which graceful antique staffage figures dance or refresh themselves by bathing in the river.

The Arcadian theme had been taken up a few years earlier by Amerling’s contemporary and fellow Viennese painter Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, who, after several visits to Sicily, created the painting Doric Temple in Sicily with Castelmola and Taormina in the background in 1849, today held by the Princely Collections of Liechtenstein. This painting also occupies a special place in Waldmüller’s oeuvre and appears to be an updated version of the antique motif of the idealised landscape which was particularly popular in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Although the style and composition of Waldmüller’s work differ greatly from the present lot, it could well have inspired Amerling’s Arcadian landscape. (KN)