1055 - Jacob Philipp Hackert

Jacob Philipp Hackert River landscape Oil on canvas. 74.5 x 82 cm. Signed and dated lower left: Philipp Hackert pinx. / Roma 1774. Provenance Coll. Schäfer, Schweinfurt. – Christie’s, Düsseldorf, 31 January 2000. – Acquired there and since then in private collection, Germany. Literature C. Nordhoff / H. Reimer: Jakob Philipp Hackert. Verzeichnis seiner Werke, vol. II, p. 32, no. 81, vol. I, p. 122, fig. 33. After a three-year stay in Paris, Jacob Philipp Hackert moved to Italy with his brother Johann Gottlieb in 1768 and settled in Rome. From there he travelled throughout the country and explored the surroundings of the city on foot, always equipped with a sketchbook. The present river landscape, painted in Rome in 1774, is a variant of a composition Hackert had already executed in 1771. Like the earlier work, it does not depict an identifiable location but combines individual motifs into a single image. On the bank of a river, a group of women and fishermen are seen in conversation, while mountains rise in the background. The river may be the Tiber or the Aniene near Tivoli. Dating from Hackert’s early Roman period, the work should be understood as an ideal landscape in which the painter was concerned above all with the pastoral mood of a southern landscape.