6069 - Blechen, Carl

Blechen, Carl A wayside cross on a rocky slope. Oil on paper, mounted on canvas. 17.8 x 20.5 cm. Dated “March 15, 1823” in the lower left corner; inscribed “Blechen” in an old hand on the back of the stretcher. Dated March 15, 1823, this landscape study is a rare example of Carl Blechen’s early work as a painter. It was created just a few months after he enrolled in the drawing and landscape class at the Berlin Academy—that is, before his stay in Dresden and his pivotal trip to Italy. Blechen’s primary interest seems to have been in exploring the chromatic color harmonies of the earth and stone. The spontaneous, fluid rendering of the landscape through color, as well as the wonderfully atmospheric balance of light and shadow in warm shades of brown and green, attest to his extraordinary artistic talent. It is already clear here that Carl Blechen thinks less in terms of contours and forms than in terms of colors and their nuances. This single work alone is more than enough to understand why he likely felt alienated at the Academy from the conception of landscape advocated by Peter Ludwig Lütke, a student of Hackert. A rocky landscape occupies roughly three-quarters of the picture plane. To the left, the view opens up to the sky and a mountain range so distant that its contours are already beginning to blur. A path winds its way from the lower left edge of the painting along a steep rock face and disappears in the center of the composition behind a bend. There, at the highest point of the path, Blechen uses a few precise brushstrokes to place a hunter with a shotgun slung over his shoulder, a wayside cross, and a figure kneeling before it into the picture. He is clearly drawing on a Romantic repertoire of motifs, yet without conveying its religious or spiritual themes on a substantive level. Nature, though deeply felt, seems to be sufficient unto itself. The work belongs to a small group of dated studies created in close chronological succession. The day before, on March 14, 1823, Blechen painted a classically composed, classical ideal landscape with a temple in a similarly small format (Rave 62); followed on March 16 by the two oil paintings “Bathing Girl” (Rave 63) and “Children in a Meadow” (Rave 64). This “small sequence,” writes Helmut Börsch-Supan in his expert report, “provides insight into the erratic nature of his work.” A certain heterogeneity, already noted by his contemporaries, would remain a hallmark of his subsequent artistic output. At the same time, it becomes clear that Blechen approached landscape art with a highly individual approach even in his earliest years: he selected and paraphrased various thematic and formal elements from artistic models, thereby arriving at a novel landscape idiom. With his free painting style and his keen sense of realism, he pointed beyond his own time. A copy of the expert opinion by Prof. Dr. Helmut Börsch-Supan dated August 20, 2024, is available. Provenance: Private collection, Hamburg. - Please request condition reports for the lots, as the condition is usually not listed in the catalog. - Please ask for condition reports for individual lots, as the condition is usually not mentioned in the catalog.