Friedrich Gauermann: Staging Nature

Employing dramatic pictorial composition, the hugely successful artist, Friedrich Gauermann (1807–1862), recreated the power of the natural world in his landscapes, populating them with intricately rendered animals and people going about their daily life. Two paintings by this important Biedermeier artist will be offered in Dorotheum’s 19th Century Paintings sale in April.

Friedrich Gauermann’s career coincided with a period of upheaval during which the practice of landscape painting underwent profound change. The realistic rendering of the landscape came to the fore, and the desire for a visual representation of tangible reality inspired artists to new heights of achievement. Gauermann belonged to the first generation of Austrian artists who recorded their personal experiences with a passionate quest for realism. He used his many sketches  created en plain air as the basis for oil paintings composed in his studio, masterfully combining the depiction of landscape and genre motifs and figures, revealing a new world of natural beauty and convivial rural life to the viewer.

Gauermann’s studies of nature not only served as a basis for his own work but were also much admired by his fellow painters. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller (1793–1865) is known to have borrowed an oil study from Gauermann in the 1830’s to use as the basis of a landscape of his own. Many Austrian landscape and animal painters were also in active contact with Friedrich Gauermann, including his two brothers-in-law Josef Höger (1801–1877) and Wilhelm Pollak (1802–1860), as well as Josef Feid (1806–1870). They hiked through the Austrian Alps and enthusiastically recorded their personal experiences in drawings and paintings.

From the 1820’s onwards, Friedrich Gauermann, who was born in Miesenbach in Lower Austria, consistently depicted the rural idyll in his paintings, with the landscape being the dominant pictorial element. From the 1830’s onwards, his compositions became increasingly animated and more dramatic. The forces of nature, visualised by storms, thunderstorms and downpours as well as dramatic lighting conditions, form the basic theme of his compositions. Gauermann focused on theatrical cloud formations and lighting effects, a development reflected in the painter’s notebooks, in which he began to discuss the relationship between light and dark in his descriptions of the pictures. Today, the meticulously kept notebook not only informs us about the artist’s many different clients throughout Europe, but also about his working methods and his view of nature.

In 1843, he himself described the painting A Bull Fighting a Bear as follows: ‘Fight between a bull and a bear; the bear is pressed against the rock, cows shy away on the left, further in the centre ground, the alpine pasture. Gloomy lighting.’ The direct observation of nature always remained the basis of Gauermann’s work and he added to his collection of motifs in the course of his travels, hikes and journeys, which he regularly undertook with painter friends. There is a preparatory drawing for the above painting in the collection of the Landessammlung Niederösterreich, (inv. no. KS-2809). The artist’s endeavours to capture the lighting conditions and depict the moment are already evident in the broad hatching of the pencil drawing. Gauermann used his sketches and studies made in nature not only to recreate a scene; they also served to prepare the pictorial drama. The boundaries between real nature and the painter’s own artistic imagination and creativity become blurred, creating an exciting pictorial universe.

Up until the early 1840’s, Gauermann continued to delight the public with unusual and dramatic subjects, captivating them with new ideas and compositions. From the late 1840’s onwards however, Gauermann’s standard alpine genres and scenes of wild animals, animal fights and hunts became less innovative although these works remained very popular with patrons from the Austrian and international aristocracy. The bourgeois clientele, on the other hand, seemed to prefer peasant scenes with alpine motifs of a type illustrated by the painting At the Farrier in which he depicts the rural idyll in his characteristic naturalistic style. Friedrich Gauermann depicts all the action with precise, brilliant detail. The depiction of the idealised genre scene is set against the backdrop of the tremendous power of nature, the artist’s mastery particularly evident in the evocative, dramatic cloudscape which dominates the view.

The artist had a perfect command of the drama of nature and owed his great success throughout his life to this emotive subject. It is understandable that many Austrian painters, including Edmund Mahlknecht (1820–1903), were inspired to follow in his footsteps. Friedrich Gauermann’s paintings of the endless confrontation between man and the forces of nature retain a sense of eternal relevance to this day.