Getty Museum
Landscape with Forest Chapel
Creator
Heinrich Johann GärtnerGerman Artist · 1828–1909
All works by this person →> The only buildings are temples, pyramids, ancient places of burial, altars consecrated to the divinities, pleasure houses of regular architecture. And if nature appear not there as we everyday casually see her, she is at least represented as we think she ought to be. > >--Roger de Piles Thus art critic Roger de Piles described the heroic landscape, Heinrich Johann Gärtner's specialty, which cons
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1847
- Medium
- Pen and dark brown ink with graphite underdrawing
- Culture
- German
- Department
- Drawings
- Institution
- Getty Museum
"Art . . . stands as a uniting link between the soul and nature, and can be apprehended only in the living center of both," wrote philosopher Friedrich von Schelling in 1807. Artists such as Heinrich Johann Gärtner, who used landscape to evoke religious and spiritual ideas, eagerly took up this tenet of Romanticism. With a fine-nibbed pen and a virtuoso technique, Gärtner painstakingly differentiated species while creating an ornamental forest of dense yet delicate layers of plants. But he portrayed more than plants: his diminutive humans express a contemplative spirituality in which humanity is both immersed in and one with nature. The shepherd tending his flock and the religious procession approaching a chapel with a graveyard also allude to earlier religions, both pagan and medieval. In a manner reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich, whose Christian art was similarly based in nature, the forest is hushed and waiting.
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