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Johann Christian Reinhart (1761 - 1847)
Johann Christian Reinhart, who lived in Rome starting in 1789, is one of the founders, along with Joseph Anton Koch, of German romantic classical landscape painting. Their art differed from the earlier practiced Veduta painting through its new orientation. Owing to intensive scrutiny of Claude Lorrain's and Nicolas Poussin's classical ideal landscapes, as well as those of the 17th century Dutch landscape painters they developed a new, more sensitive approach to landscape. Even though this emotional tendency contains elements of the early romantic, their way of painting is still immersed in the classical: Meticulous and detailed, in addition to being tightly structured it seems apparent that the work in general is always based on drawing.
Reinharts' landscapes are fashioned to ideal scenes; and, according to his method, it is the idyllic characterization that raises the landscape painting to a work of art. The Arcadian feeling in his pictures stems from a warm, clay-like coloration and a sensitive placement in nature of human figures. In this fashion Reinharts' landscape compositions are directly related to their classical counterparts: The scenery is framed laterally through groups of trees. Owing to differentiated coloration on varied focal planes the scene acquires its spatial quality. |
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