(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, the margins somewhat stained, mounted, framed, (Sch)

Provenance:
Private collection, Austria

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

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.

Catalogue entry by Dr. 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, some of which look like compositions, especially if I add some stories," Joseph Anton Koch wrote to his patron, the collector and art writer Karl Friedrich von Uexküll, on 14 January 1806. The "Book of Drawings", made in the summer of 1805 during a joint hike with the painter Christoph Friedrich Dörr, who came from Tübingen, is now in the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) of the Academy in Vienna, broken up into individual sheets. The pencil drawings show landscapes from the surroundings of Subiaco, a mountain village east of Rome in the Aequi Mountains, some of which Koch used as models for his etching series "Views from Rome" in 1810. Among them, sheet 14 shows a view of the small Rocca di Mezzo to the west of Subiaco, which corresponds to our drawing.
Like the etching, our print shows a mountainous landscape, partly wooded and flattening towards the foreground, in which a shepherd smoking his pipe and accompanied by two dogs is sitting in front on the right. On the left, a flock of goats driven by a shepherdess is coming down a sloping path, in front of them a man is riding on a mule, preceded by three figures already disappearing into the hollow - one of them a woman with a water jug on her head.
These figures and the pipe-smoking shepherd are missing in the drawing in Vienna (Inv. No. 6365), which may indicate that it was made during the hike. It looked already like a "composition", but Koch helped it along a little by adding "some stories" – as for example the rural staffage, which gives the landscape a narrative note, and the thin strip of ground in the foreground, sloping down to the left, on which the shepherd is sitting and which, together with the tree on the right, closes the landscape in the sense of a composition.
In a sketchy pen-and-ink drawing in the Landesmuseum in Hanover (Inv. No. LA 83), we see how Koch used the staffage to transform the view of the landscape from nature into a pictorial composition. It can already be seen as a preparatory work for the projected views of the Roman surroundings, but it was our detailed sheet that served as a direct model for his etching. It bears the number "14" in the upper right margin outside the framed representation, which thus already determines its position in the sequence of etchings. The drawing defines the outlines of the individual landscape backgrounds and the cloud formations in the sky; various degrees of hatching, especially in the trees but also in the sloping rocks, signal to the engraver the places where he has to use deeper blacks. It is a characteristic preparatory drawing for an engraving, the motif of which Koch repeated around 1820 in a larger sheet (Inv. No. 6339), which is also in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Vienna Academy.