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1489 Watercolour and gouache on paper, 29 x 42 cm The Hermitage, St. Petersburg This watercolour is among the earliest landscape paintings in European art to depict a specific location. D?rer may well have painted it in the summer of 1489, at the age of 18, although it could date from 1494 after his journeyman travels. Inscribed `Saint John's Church', it shows the church and a row of houses which lay just to the west of Nuremberg. Nearly 40 years later D?rer was to be buried in Saint John's graveyard. D?rer's watercolour view faces south, with a view of the distant hills beyond. The perspective is curious; it is almost a bird's-eye view. The row of houses appears flat rather than three-dimensional. Despite these problems, D?rer has lavished great care on the picture. In his early watercolours he was more concerned about the rendering of detail, rather than the overall effect. The watercolour of Saint John's Church was looted during the Second World War and lost for nearly 50 years. Owned by the Kunsthalle in Bremen, it was among thousands of Old Master drawings which had been hidden for safekeeping in the cellar of a mansion 50 miles north-west of Berlin. The Red Army occupied the house in 1945 and soldiers ransacked the art works. Viktor Baldin, a young officer, found this watercolour on the floor, among a mass of works abandoned by the first looters. He saved the picture, along with 363 other drawings (including 22 D?rers), and brought it back to Russia. Baldin later gave the drawings to the architectural museum near Moscow where he worked. The existence of the missing Bremen pictures was kept secret until 1992. They are temporarily at the Hermitage in St Petersburg and lengthy negotiations are likely before their return to Bremen.Artist:D?RER, Albrecht Title: St John's Church Painted in 1501-1550 , German - - graphics : landscape |
