Austrian painter, active mainly in Rome, where he settled in 1795. He was influenced by Carstens and worked with the Nazarenes on the decorations of the Casino Massimo (1825-29) in Rome, choosing Dante’s Inferno for his subject, but is now best known for his landscapes. They were directly descended from the heroic and ideal landscape of Poussin, but have a distinctive Romantic flavour, particularly in his paintings of mountains.
This Heroic Landscape affords a wide view into an idealizes cosmic landscape. It is timeless and placeless, as if a curtain had been raised in a theater on a vision of archaic history. We are shown and ideal that is remote from reality, with shepherds, whose works appears to be effortless. This is the dreamlike, original state of golden age. By abandoning aerial perspective, Koch is able to give a clear view into the distance, and both the peaceful rural scene in the foreground and the town with its temple in the middle ground are overarched by the rainbow, the symbol of eternal peace after the deluge.
Koch painted several versions of the motif, and he himself thought very highly of it.
This signed and dated painting is the fourth and final version of a composition he first painted in 1805. Koch renewed the genre of the heroic landscape, which had been established by the seventeenth-century French masters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin.
A native of Tyrol, Koch joined the Jacobins in revolutionary Strasbourg and conducted nature studies in the Swiss Alps before going to Rome, where he took classical art and literature as his guidelines. Gradually his approach developed from the pure landscape depictions of his Swiss watercolours to landscapes whose accessories and figures charged them with historical meaning. In art, as Koch put it, “history and nature… can be depicted… separately as little as God separated them in the history (of mankind).”
A group of German painters based in Rome in the early nineteenth century had a most decisive effect on the development of German art. The foremost of these artists was Joseph Anton Koch. He was born in Obergiblen in the Tyrol in 1768 but lived in Rome from spring 1795 to his death in 1839. Here he painted the ‘heroic landscapes’ which form the major part of his work. His Mountain scene of 1796, one of his earliest paintings, shows his attempt to continue the tradition of seventeenth-century landscape painting and to relate the heroic grandeur of nature to the human life that is dependent on it.
In a letter written in 1797, the artist stated: “My genre is landscape painting, historic or poetic landscape.”
In this painting we see a view out of the Lauterbrunnental to the Schmadribach falls in the Bernese Oberland. This brings us closer to Koch’s idea of the “poetic” landscape, and to “heroic” landscape as well. By poetic he meant the combination and compression of several elements that are never experienced together in nature. Here, in this powerful depiction of the mountains, the view is directed both downwards and upwards at once. Peaks that in reality conceal each other now tower one behind the other, all in view. This makes the Alps look as monumental as a range in the Himalayas. But at the same time details in the foreground are clearly visible.
In all of Koch’s paintings, nature retained its inviolable, indestructible grandeur and dignity. In his depiction of the Schmadribach Falls, certain alterations were made in the geographically precise view and the abundance of topographical details - such as the snowcap added to the mountain on the left, the Grosshorn - in order to heighten the poetic expressiveness and sublimity of the scene.
The painting is an idealized representation of the Alps, composed in the artist’s studio in Rome.
This typical painting by Koch was executed in 1813 in Vienna after sketches made in Italy. It is enlivened by a peasant group, probably cribbed from a Flemish source. Though it suggests a Flight into Egypt, that is no baby, it is a fruit basket.
