Albert Rieger Austrian, 1834-1905

'One has to be familiar with the Greek atmosphere, the Greek sun and the character of the Greek soil to be able to imagine the beauty of its sight. The south of Italy, Calabria, Apulia and Sicily, cannot help us visualize these distant Greek landscapes in which the richest mountain-tops, comparable to statues of Phidias and Praxiteles carved with purity and plasticity, may vanish in a variety of colour with which nothing can be compared in terms of harmony, freedom, choice of hues and the playful changes of the light. Indeed, distant landscapes, chains of mountains and clustered rocks truly exist only in Greece, and even the Italian sky never has the infinite charm possessed by the Greek atmosphere, this luminous space which is so well described by the words ''an ether of surpassing brightness''.' (Leo von Klenze, Aphoristische Bemerkungen gesammelt auf seiner Reise nach Griechenland, 1838).

In the early nineteenth century Greece had become a fashionable meeting-place for artists and tourists of all nationalities. Athens in particular, with its multitude of archeological sites, was the centre of attraction for most visitors to Greece, as an appreciation of ancient Greek culture inspired a growing number of Europeans to go beyond the prescribed perimeters of the Grand Tour.  John Cam Hobhouse, Byron's travelling companion to Greece, wrote in his Journey through Albania in 1813: ‘At the period when every young man of fortune, in France and England, considered it an indispensable part of his education to survey the monuments of ancient art remaining in Italy, only a few desperate scholars and artists ventured to trust themselves among the barbarians, to contemplate the ruins of Greece. But these terrors, which a person who had been on the spot cannot conceive could ever have been well founded, seem at last to be dispelled; Attica at present swarms with travellers. ‘ 

The present work depicts travellers near the Olympieum in a sweeping view with the Acropolis visible in the distance. The Temple of Olympian Zeus, to the east of the Acropolis, was begun in the late sixth century BC. With its gigantic columns rising perpendicularly in the midst of a vast platform it appeared to the nineteenth-century visitor as a model of the sublimity of classical Greek art. In the foreground to the left can be seen the river Illisus. Rieger thus captured a view of Athens that may not only have striked him for its visual beauty, but which was also rich in classical associations, for it was the verdant banks of the Illissus that inspired Socrates' lyrical description at the beginning of Plato's Phaedrus.

Rieger appears to have been particularly impressed by the vibrant orange and purple evening light that often bathes the Athens plain, whose effect on artists was so well described by J.A. Symonds: 'The specific quality of the Athenian landscape is light - not richness or sublimity or romantic loveliness or grandeur of mountain outline, but luminous beauty, serene exposure to the airs of heaven ...  lïóôåöávïò is an epithet of Aristophanes for his city; and if not crowned with other violets, Athens wears for her garland the air-empurpled hills - Hymettus, Lycabettus, Pentelicus, and Parnes. From whatever point the plains of Athens may be surveyed, it always presents a picture of dignified and lustrous beauty. The Acropolis is the centre of this landscape, splendid as a work of art with its own crown of temples. '(John Addington Symonds, Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, 1898).