Nature as Ideal: Drawings by Joseph Anton Koch and Johann Christian Reinhart

Over the last ten years, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has acquired a substantial and representative collection of works by the circle of German and Austrian artists living in Rome about 1800, most notably Joseph Anton Koch (1768 – 1839) and Johann Christian Reinhart (1761 – 1847). Both artists devoted themselves to landscapes in a Neoclassical style that picture an idealized nature as a reflection of a higher spirituality. They held a key position in the revival of landscape painting and drawing about 1800 — not only in the rich painted and graphic oeuvre they left behind but also in their personal influence as critical guides to the events in the art world unfolding around them. They functioned as promoters of the next generation of artists, for whom the ideal classicism of Koch and Reinhart served as a starting point for the development of a genuine Romantic conception of landscape. The graphic work of the Tirol native Joseph Anton Koch from different periods and in various genres is particularly well represented in the Museum’s collection. He was unquestionably one of the most important practitioners of Neoclassical landscape painting and drawing. The son of a landless laborer in the Lechtal in Tirol (Austria), Koch received decisive assistance from the bishop of Augsburg, who, after being apprised of the boy’s early demonstration of a talent for drawing, made it possible for him to receive proper artistic training. During his years at the Hohe Karlsschule in Stuttgart from 1785 to 1791, Koch was stirred by the ideas of the French Revolution. Rejecting the restrictive and outmoded teaching methods, he left the school in 1791 for Strasbourg. There he first moved in Jacobin circles but soon distanced himself from them and set out on travels through Switzerland, where, over several years, he produced a large number of landscape studies from nature that served as a reservoir of motifs for his later works. After going to Italy and briefly staying in Naples, he settled in Rome in 1795, where he received his mail at the Antico Caffè Greco in the Strada Condotti. There he joined the circle around Johann Christian Reinhart, the Danish-German painter Asmus Jakob Carstens (1754 – 1788), and the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770 – 1844). He spent the greater part of his life in Rome, where, with his pronounced, outgoing personality, he became the center of the German artists’ colony. Something of that personality is expressed in an outstanding portrait of Koch by the Swiss artist and sometime coworker in Koch’s atelier Hieronymus Hess (1799 – 1850),1 which is now also in the Metropolitan Museum (Figure 1).2 Koch, born in 1768 — as is noted on the drawing — belonged to a generation that chose to ennoble the empirical image of nature with idealized compositions and the incorporation of narratives, generally drawn from classical mythology. The first of his works to be discussed here is a gouache of a southern coastal landscape that is impressive for its large size and ambitious staffage (Figure 2).3 The landscape represents — in idealized form — the town of Vietri sul Mare, on the Gulf of Salerno, south of Naples.4 This sheet clearly reproduces the view, executed from nature, that is now in the Kupferstichkabinett of the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien in Vienna (Figure 3).5 The Viennese drawing made on site and the idealized New York view are immediate reflections of Koch’s response to the magnificent coastal landscape south of Naples. Its lush vegetation and classic blocklike architecture already presented a consummate harmony that was suited to Koch’s purposes. He rightly saw this stretch of coastline as the perfect incarnation of Nicolas Poussin’s (1594 – 1665) artistic ideal, one to which he subscribed and hoped to revive informed by his own vision. In its essentials the drawing in the Metropolitan follows the composition of the 1795 study: the trees as a repoussoir on the left; on the right, a towering mountain peak; and particularly the idealized, geometric southern architecture in the middle ground. The sheet is inscribed in pen and brown ink at the bottom left of the mount — doubtless with an eye to a Nature as Ideal: Drawings by Joseph Anton Koch and Johann Christian Reinhart