1065 - Carl Georg Adolph Hasenpflug

Carl Georg Adolph Hasenpflug View of a cloister Oil on canvas. 29 x 32 cm. Monogrammed and dated lower right: C. Hasenpflug 1848. Provenance Lempertz, Cologne, 5.5.1966. - Lempertz, Cologne, 15.11.1995, lot 1779. - Private collection Magdeburg. - Lempertz, Cologne, 15.11.2014, lot 1522. - Dutch private collection. Exhibitions Carl Hasenpflug (1802-1858). Wahrheit und Vision, Städtisches Museum Halberstadt, 2002. Literature P. Findeisen: Geschichte der Denkmalpflege Sachsen-Anhalts von den Anfängen bis in das erste Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 1990, p. 204. - Exh.-cat. Halberstadt 2002: Carl Hasenpflug (1802-1858). Wahrheit und Vision. Städtisches Museum Halberstadt 2002, p. 288-289. Among the most distinctive and mysterious works of Carl Hasenpflug are his depictions of snow-covered cloisters and ruins in wintry settings – a genre characteristic of a specifically German strain of late Romanticism. Hasenpflug is arguably the most outstanding representative of this particular form of architectural painting. The well-preserved and very finely executed, small painting "Blick in einen Kreuzgang" belongs to this distinctive genre. It shows the view from a cloister onto a section of Halberstadt Cathedral, to which city Hasenpflug had moved in 1828, remaining there until his death in 1858. Halberstadt Cathedral became for Hasenpflug an inexhaustible source of pictorial motifs, which he varied time and again. These are never an exact rendering of the building itself, but always composed visions of an idealised Middle Ages that, in his perception, served as a source of identity.