Christian Hilfgott Brand - inv. 1650

 This work is linked to View of a Coastal Town with a Calm Sea (inv. 1651).

The two landscapes are by Christian Hilfgott Brand, a German painter who, after the apprenticeship in his homeland, established himself in Vienna, in about 1720, where he attended the Academy. He worked as a court painter and for prestigious patrons, such as ambassadors and writers. Brand is a representative of the ‘Dutch’ trend that developed in German painting in the middle of the eighteenth century. Its preferred models were landscapes with figures of shepherds, peasants and travellers recreating the more typically northern tradition.

What is most striking in these two paintings is the warm atmosphere in which things and figures have been harmoniously immersed. Allready Von Hagedorn, a writer who was contemporary with the artist and who admired him greatly, praised the enveloping haziness in Brand’s works, the rays of sun that illuminate the branches of the trees and the water through the clouds, his fluid and constructive pictorial stroke.

R. C.