765 - Carl Ferdinand Sprosse, view of Halberstadt with town hall and council loggia, market women, 1842

Carl Ferdinand Sprosse, view of Halberstadt with town hall and council loggia, market women, 1842 (1819 Leipzig - 1874 Leipzig), oil on canvas, signed and dated 1842 lower right. Very detailed and finely painted view of the Halberstadt town hall with the council loggia of 1663: on the left the Gothic gable with pointed-arch windows and the oriel, in the centre the two-storey loggia with three round-arched arcades, parapet reliefs with masks and herms and a scrolled gable, on the right the open staircase, a person stepping out of the door of the council loggia, behind it the slate roof and the spire of St Martin's Church, on the left in the lane a half-timbered house with trees in front. In front of the town hall plinth market women with vegetable baskets at a handcart, on the left a woman in a white gown seated on a chair. Good condition commensurate with age with fine craquelure and three small retouchings. Image 44.5x40 cm (HxW), framed in a Berlin moulding, frame slightly chipped, frame width 5 cm. Carl Ferdinand Sprosse, admitted to the Leipzig Academy of Art under Veit Hanns Schnorr von Carolsfeld in 1834, is one of the architectural painters of the 19th century. From 1840 to 1844 he drew medieval buildings of central Germany for Ludwig Puttrich's work "Denkmale der Baukunst des Mittelalters in Sachsen", including the collegiate church at Gernrode and the Konradsburg in the Harz foothills, and around 1840 also worked for the architectural painter Carl Hasenpflug (1802 Berlin - 1858 Halberstadt) in Halberstadt. In 1844 he went to Rome, worked there among others for Emil Braun and Theodor Mommsen and in 1847 created a panorama of Rome from the Villa Ludovisi; works by him are held by the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, the Stadtgeschichtliches Museum Leipzig and the Hamburger Kunsthalle. The Halberstadt town hall on the Holzmarkt, destroyed in 1945, was rebuilt in 1998, and the council loggia of 1663 was reconstructed from 2000 to 2004 using salvaged original stones. Hasenpflug's oil painting "Halberstadt Holzmarkt" of 1830 in the Städtisches Museum Halberstadt shows the same town hall in the middle of the Holzmarkt with St Martin's Church in the background; twelve years later Sprosse brings the council loggia into close-up view. Hasenpflug's pupil Wilhelm Steuerwaldt (1815 Quedlinburg - 1871 Quedlinburg), later at the Düsseldorf Academy under Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, also painted views of Halberstadt; the Städtisches Museum Halberstadt holds a version of his "Klosterhof im Schnee", a subject also painted by Hasenpflug. In its detailed, fine rendering of the architecture, Sprosse's town hall painting of 1842 is close to Hasenpflug's architectural paintings of Halberstadt and takes its place among the views of Halberstadt by Hasenpflug and Steuerwaldt.