Lot 1141 | View from the Grafenberg near Düsseldorf into the Rhine Valley

WILLE, AUGUST VON
1829 Kassel - 1887 Düsseldorf

Title: View from the Grafenberg near Düsseldorf into the Rhine Valley.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Mounting: Relined.
Measurement: 49,5 x 61cm.
Notation: Signed and dated lower left: A. von Wille / 1854.
Frame/Pedestal: Framed.
Cf. Literature:
W. Alberth: August von Wille. Ein Düsseldorfer Maler zwischen Romantik und Realismus, Petersberg 2020, ill. 148.

Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany.

August von Wille, the father of the popular Eifel chronicler Fritz von Wille and a pupil of Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, offers here a wide view from the heights of the Grafenberg into the plain of the Lower Rhine near Düsseldorf. Under the threatening thunderstorm sky, lansquenets with their wagons march up the hill to a half-ruined saint's shrine. This landscape scene combines the two aspects of the Düsseldorf School of Painting: the narrative genre with the marching lansquenets embedded in the topographically exact landscape scenes by Schirmer's students.
In his dissertation on August von Wille, Wolfgang Alberth shows the artist's 1853 oil study, in which he sketches the landscape with the stormy sky in a smaller format and with an exact description of the location. In the present version, the artist places the people as well as a saint's shrine into this landscape - the latter of which he repeated years later in an evening atmosphere that can be found today in the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen.