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River Landscape August von Pettenkofen

Subtitle

By the Tisza

Artist

August von Pettenkofen Vienna, 1822 – Vienna, 1889

Culture Austrian
Date mid-19th century
Object type painting
Medium, technique oil on canvas
Dimensions

18.5 × 28.3 cm

Inventory number 381.B
Collection Department of Art after 1800
On view This artwork is not on display

The discovery in the mid-nineteenth century of the Great Hungarian Plain by Austrian painters, including August von Pettenkofen, was no accident: having tired of the con straints of academicism, they turned towards nature. For them, the Hungarian plains were already part of the “exotic east”, and the lights and impressions of the Great Plain landscape made the town of Szolnok even more attractive in their eyes, a location which became easily accessible with the construction of the railway. Their art and choice of subject were also significantly influenced by French landscape painting and the Barbizon school. Pettenkofen also visited both Paris and Barbizon; the pictures he created there may also be considered ethnographic recordings. His work entitled „River Landscape”, painted in the early 1850s, is based on the contrast between the lonely figure of an angler and the endless Hungarian lowlands surrounding him. The view of the spacious horizon of the river bank is interrupted only by a towering tree. The swampy landscape depicted in the painting is also special because this natural environment on the banks of the Tisza, a diverse source of inspiration for artists at the time, disappeared permanently with the river regulations of the 1870s.
Bianka Boda

References

Művészet és vadászat: válogatás a Szépművészeti Múzeum és a Magyar Nemzeti Galéria gyűjteményéből, p. 232-233.

This record is subject to revision due to ongoing research.

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