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1768-1839
Austrian
Joseph Anton Koch Galleries
was an Austrian painter of the German Romantic movement. The Tyrolese painter left academic training in the Karlsschule Stuttgart, a strict military academy, and traveled through France and Switzerland. He arrived in Rome in 1795. Koch was close to the painter Asmus Jacob Carstens and carried on Carstens' 'heroic' art, at first in a literal manner.
After 1800 Koch developed as a landscape painter. In Rome he espoused a new type of 'heroic' landscape, revising the classical compositions of Poussin and Lorrain with a more rugged, mountainous scenery. He left Rome in 1812 and stayed in Vienna until 1815, in protest of the French invasion. During this period he incorporated more non-classical themes in his work. In Vienna he was influenced by Friedrich Schlegel and enthusiasts of old German art. In response, his style became harsher, and this new approach had a wide influence on German landscape painters who visited Rome.
Mountain Scene
110 x 161 cm Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne A group of German painters based in Rome in the early nineteenth century had a most decisive effect on the development of German art. The foremost of these artists was Joseph Anton Koch. He was born in Obergiblen in the Tyrol in 1768 but lived in Rome from spring 1795 to his death in 1839. Here he painted the 'heroic landscapes' which form the major part of his work. His Mountain scene of 1796, one of his earliest paintings, shows his attempt to continue the tradition of seventeenth-century landscape painting and to relate the heroic grandeur of nature to the human life that is dependent on it
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