(Leipzig 1745–1808 Dresden)
A Campagna landscape with Travellers,
oil on canvas, 59.8 x 73 cm, framed

We are grateful to Anke Fröhlich-Schauseil and to Claudia Nordhoff for endorsing the attribution in full. A written certificate by Anke Fröhlich-Schauseil, September 2016, is available.

Jacob Wilhelm Mechau received his training in Berlin, where he studied under Rode and Blaise Nicolas Le Seur. In Dresden he was trained by Giovanni Battista Casanova, before heading to Leipzig where he was patronized and befriended by Christian Ludwig Hagedorn. But it was in Rome, where he first travelled to with his close friend Heinrich Friedrich Füger in September 1776, that his art developed and matured (see A. Fröhlich: “...er folgte seinem eigenen Genius...”: dem Landschaftsmaler Jakob Wilhelm Mechau (1745–1808) zum 200. Geburtstag, in: Dresdener Kunstblätter, Bd. 52, München 2008). Influenced by Jakob Philipp Hackert, he specialized in idealized „heroic“ landscapes in the Claude tradition and became a vital part of the Roman artistic community. His harmonious compositions and cool and elegant coloring has only recently been brought back into art historical focus, which is surprising, as contemporaries unanimously praised his work, Philipp Otto Runge even calling him the most important landscape painter of his generation. Together with Johann Christian Reinhart he published a well-received series of engravings of views of Italy (see C. Schwichtenberg-Winkler, Die “Collection ou suite pittoresque de l’Italie dessinées d’après nature et gravées à l’eau forte a Rome par trois peintres allemands A. C. Dies, Charles Reinhart, Jacques Mechau”, 1792–98, 1799: das Pittoreske und die römische Vedute um 1800, Diss., Aachen 1992).