Joseph Rebell

Joseph Rebel The Bay of Naples with the Palazzo Donna Anna Oil on canvas. 45.5 x 67 cm. Monogrammed and dated lower right: Jos. Rebell 1820. Provenance Swiss private collection. - Koller, Zurich 29.3.2019, lot 3208. - Belgian private collection. Exhibitions Joseph Rebell, In the Light of the South, Lower Belvedere, Vienna 2022, p. 95. Joseph Rebell was one of the most important Austrian landscape painters of his time. Last year, the Belvedere Museum in Vienna presented an overview of his oeuvre, which included this radiant view of the Bay of Naples with the Palazzo Donna Anna. After completing his training at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, Joseph Rebell traveled to Italy via Switzerland in 1810. He initially stayed in Milan for a year, before moving to Naples, where he spent two years. But even after his departure, the city at the foot of Mount Vesuvius remained a recurring motif in his paintings. The present view, which shows the unfinished palazzo and the fishing beach in front of it in the sunlight, was painted in Rome in 1820, where Rebell lived between 1816 and 1824. Joseph Rebell did not lack success and recognition throughout his life. His list of collectors and patrons includes some illustrious names. In his early years in Milan, he was already in contact with Eugène Beauharnais and his Bavarian wife, Princess Augusta Amalia, and subsequently with Caroline Bonaparte in Naples. In his native Vienna, Prince John I of Liechtenstein acquired an "Eruption of Vesuvius" from his hand, and further works reached Munich via Crown Prince Ludwig I of Bavaria, Count Schack and the master builder Leo von Klenze. In 1819, he met Emperor Franz I in Rome, who ordered four large-format views of the area around Naples from him. In 1824, he appointed him director of the Imperial Picture Gallery in the Upper Belvedere, which Rebell transformed into a modern museum until his sudden death in 1828. Rebell's landscape painting has often been stylistically derived from Claude Lorrain and Joseph Anton Koch. However, the majority of his paintings are not idealized landscapes, but rather landscape and city views that originate from the veduta art of the 18th century and are definitely landscape paintings in the tradition of Jacob Philipp Hackert. Rebell had been able to study Hackert's painting extensively on the basis of magnificent originals in Naples and Caserta.