Lot 1239 | Jakob Philipp Hackert | "Blick auf Eboli"

HACKERT, JAKOB PHILIPP
1737 Prenzlau - 1807 Florence

Title: "Blick auf Eboli". View of Eboli.
Date: 1795.
Technique: Inkpen and brush over pencil on paper.
Mounting: Mounted.
Measurement: 57 x 83cm.
Notation: Signed and dated in the centre on the rock: "Eboli 1795 / Filippo Hackert f".

Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany.

"The landscape painter Jakob Philipp Hackert had received his first education in Berlin. After a stay in Stralsund and on the island Rügen he went to Paris where he would be working with continuously increasing success for three years. In the summer 1768 he has been travelling through Italy and arrived in Rome in winter of the same year. Here he quickyly advanced toward the most popular landscape painter not only in the Eternal City but also in all of Europe. He associated with monarchs, sold his works to noble visitors of Rome from all over the world and was graciously welcomed by Pope Pius VI. In 1786 Hackert eventually became the first court painter in the service of the Neapolitan king Ferdinand IV of the Bourbon dynasty.
In the 1790s Hackert reached the pinnacle of his fame by becoming court painter. Now he spent more time outside of the captial and dedicated his work to his more solitary "picturesque wanderings". The region behind Persano, located between Campania, Apulia and Calabria, was not at all one of the destinations of the "Grand Tour" and was far away from all usual itinerary. Significant only was the small hunting lodges of Persano here that was often used by the enthusiastic hunter Ferdinand IV. The little town Eboli was not unknown to the artist so he had painter a view of the lodge in Persano by order of Ferdinands IV in 1782 and had travelled this area for this occasion. One delicate sketch from 1782 however does not feature Eboli itself but a fountain at a road, "close to Eboli on the way to Paestum" (German: "in der Nähe Ebolis auf dem Weg nach Paestum").
It is imaginable that Hackert actually had not been in Eboli in 1782 and visited the place for the first time now. A drawing dated to 1795, today in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, shows a tree-framed small wild stream in the foreground where a woman is doing her laundry, from the right a sheperd is approaching with two cows. Behind this scene, you can spot the rooftops of Eboli.
In our drawing the artist presents a now bigger cutout from Eboli seen from a different loaction. Hackert is in the Southeast from the town, with the river Sele in the back. On the left you can see the church S. Maria del Carmine once more, on the right the large-scale castle is recognisable. Behind the town the Monti di Eboli are rising. While Eboli is explictly visble on its hill, the observer's gaze must surmount quite a distance. The drawer's position lies on a patch of darkly shaded soil that is covered by different foliage plants; at the left of the image one individual tree grows. The exact depiction of the trees and plants hints at Hackert's botanic knowledge that he translated into his landscape paintings and drawings. Indeed the artist had summarised his thoughts in a small treaty about landscape painting in the 1790s, in which he classified trees and plants.
On the other side of the slope, two women and a child sit in front of a flock of sheep - Hackert has added his signature to the right of them, as if to indicate to the viewer that he has now left his original position at the lower edge of the picture and joined the women and sheep in order to walk on from there towards Eboli. This appears in bright sunlight behind the dense treetops of the forest and is in turn backdropped by the only delicately hinted at Monti di Eboli. The individual areas of the picture appear to be formally confined to a small space and superimposed on one another, but the different proportions on the one hand, and the crevices and gorges on the other, make it clear that great distances can indeed be imagined here. It is up to the viewer to realise this by connecting the different levels in a visual walk.
The drawing is an outstanding work by Hackert. Firstly, it is an important addition to the group of works from the hike undertaken in 1795 and a rare pictorial document of the then unknown area around Eboli. In addition, the artist succeeds here in depicting a mountainous landscape in a harmonious context without the use of central perspective and by including the viewer - a masterly achievement by the draughtsman that fully justifies his reputation as the best landscape artist of his time." (Abridged version of the expert opinion by Claudia Nordhoff.)

We are grateful to Claudia Nordhoff, Rome, who confirmed the attribution on basis of a high-resolution digital photograph, for her kind support in cataloguing the present work.