162 - Johann Adam Klein (1792 Nuremberg – Munich 1875), Cavalry Under a Cloudy Sky.

Johann Adam Klein (1792 Nuremberg – Munich 1875), Cavalry Under a Cloudy Sky. Watercolor and black pen over pencil on vellum. Approx. 25 x 32 cm. Mounted and monogrammed in the lower right corner. In 1811, Johann Adam Klein arrived at the Academy in Vienna with a letter of recommendation from the Nuremberg art dealer Johann Friedrich Frauenholz. Although he studied diligently there, his real interest lay in the colorful hustle and bustle of the city: “I was very interested in the lively traffic on Vienna’s main squares and marketplaces and the various picturesque national costumes of the Hungarians, Poles, Wallachians, and Austrians, along with their carts,” Klein wrote in his autobiography in 1833. He ceaselessly filled his sketchbook with sketches and drawings of such picturesque scenes, which also included the colorful military parades and encampments of the various troops stationed in Vienna in 1813 and 1814. In Vienna, Klein became a chronicler of the troops involved in the Wars of Liberation; yet he did not depict battles, but rather the colorful appearance of their various uniforms—an activity he continued in part after his return to Nuremberg in 1815, sometimes together with his friend Johann Christoph Erhard. In October 1815, they jointly sketched Russian ulans encamped in the open, who had halted their retreat due to Napoleon’s return from Elba, as well as other troops of the anti-Napoleonic coalition passing through Nuremberg. Our unfinished watercolor also stems from such closely observed studies; it derives its special charm from the juxtaposition of precise pen-and-ink drawing and the finely nuanced watercolor rendering of the sky, which has settled darkly over the troops. Mighty and menacing, weighing heavily, the outskirts of the thunderclouds drift by; on the right, the sky is already breaking open, revealing the blue of the heavens. The drama of the celestial spectacle is echoed by the horsemen, meticulously observed in their uniforms—Austrian cuirassiers —relaxed and unimpressed by the receding storm that still looms menacingly overhead, they watch their departing troops against the lightly sketched, pencil-outlined silhouette of a hilly landscape. The juxtaposition of the finished and the unfinished became a compositional principle of artistic experience in Romantic landscape art, in which the fragment of nature corresponded to the Romantic worldview. This “principle of the unfinished” (Reinhard Wegner), however, can only be applied to our watercolor to a limited extent, since the juxtaposition of the finished and the unfinished was not originally intended: While Klein completed the stormy sky, the landscape and the cuirassiers—accurately rendered as pen-and-ink outlines, among whom a few civilians are mingled—remained unfinished; they were meant to be painted in watercolor, like the surrounding landscape, but for unknown reasons this was never done. While the juxtaposition of the finished and the unfinished may seem highly appealing to today’s eye, trained in modernism, it was not originally intended. Today, however, the unfinished watercolor affords us insight into Klein’s carefully calculated working process: In a loose pencil sketch, Klein first laid out the silhouette of the landscape and the troops marching in the foreground—they are still visible in the areas where they are not obscured by the cuirassiers and the civilians standing nearby. This group is not based on any study from life but was arranged in the studio, likely from individual studies created from life. In a second step, Klein then painted the dramatically charged stormy sky, leaving out their heads and upper bodies—though he did not follow this approach consistently, for toward the right edge, there is overlap with the two cuirassiers and the figure with a hat seen from behind, and where he does not continue rendering the sky—perhaps they no longer corresponded to his original compositional concept, which is why he refrained from further completion. The watercolor was particularly well-suited for “capturing what is perceived at the very moment of perception” (Peter Märker), especially for fleeting phenomena such as the drama of a receding stormy sky. It still seems to express the ever-present threat posed by the many troops stationed at the gates of Nuremberg at the time, yet peace appears to be on the horizon—the blue sky opens up as the embodiment of this hope. For overall, Klein depicts a peaceful scene in which military personnel and civilians interact. The cuirassiers on the right are conversing with a gentleman on horseback; to the left of them, a Hungarian infantryman—presumably—is speaking to another cuirassier, and in front of them stands a mother with her