(1768-1839)
Rocca di S. Stefano di Mezzo, e Canturano, c. 1810, signed J. Koch fece., pen and brown ink over pencil on paper, numbered "14" in the upper right corner, 15,5 x 21,5 cm, slightly browned, somewhat stained at the margins, mounted, framed, (Sch)

Provenance:
Private collection, Austria

Compare:
Otto von Lutterotti, Joseph Anton Koch 1768-1839 - Leben und Werk. Mit einem vollständigen Werkverzeichnis, Wien 1985, Cat. Z 1057, S. 336; p. 275, Fig. 241 (etching).

Catalogue text by Peter Prange:

"A few months ago, I made a short journey on foot with Dörr to the mountains of Subiaco, where I produced a whole book full of drawings, including some of which, if I make an effort, look like compositions, especially if I add a few stories," Joseph Anton Koch wrote to his patron, the patron, collector and art writer Karl Friedrich von Uexküll, on January 14, 1806. The "Book of Drawings", created in the summer of 1805 during a joint hike with the painter Christoph Friedrich Dörr from Tübingen, is now preserved as loose individual sheets in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The pencil drawings show landscapes from the surroundings of Subiaco, a mountain village east of Rome in the Aequerberg mountains, some of which Koch used as models for his etching series "Views from Rome" in 1810. Among these, sheet 14 includes the view of small Rocca di Mezzo to the west of Subiaco, which is in accordance with our drawing.
Like the etching, our sheet shows a mountainous landscape, partly wooded and flattening towards the foreground, in which a shepherd accompanied by two dogs is sitting in the foreground on the right, smoking his pipe. On the left, a herd of goats driven by a shepherdess comes down a sloping path, in front of which a man is riding a mule, preceded by three figures already disappearing into the hollow - one of them a woman with a water jug on her head.
They are missing, as is the pipe-smoking shepherd in the drawing in Vienna (inv. no. 6365), which was created during the hike. Although it already looked like a "composition", Koch helped it along a little by adding "some stories" - the rural staffage, which provides the landscape with a narrative note, and the thin strip of ground in the foreground, sloping down to the left, on which the shepherd sits and which, together with the tree on the right, closes the landscape in the sense of a composition.
A sketchy pen and ink drawing in the Landesmuseum in Hanover (inv. no. LA 83) shows how Koch uses the staffage to transform the view of the landscape taken in front of nature into a pictorial composition. The drawing can already be seen as a preparatory work for the intended views from Rome, but only our detailed sheet served as a direct model for his etching. It bears the number "14" in the upper right margin outside of the framed depiction, which already determines its position in the sequence of etchings. The outline of the drawing defines the individual landscape backgrounds and the cloud formations in the sky; different degrees of hatching, especially in the trees, but also in the sloping rocks, informed the engraver the places where he had to use deeper blacks. It is a characteristic preparatory drawing for an engraving whose motif Koch repeated again around 1820 in a larger sheet (inv. no. 6339), which is also kept in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.

We are grateful to Dr. Peter Prange for the confirmation of the attribution by means of a high-resolution digital photograph and for the scientific support.