- 28
Johann König Nuremberg 1586 - 1642
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Description
- Johann König
- an extensive landscape with the flight into egypt
- signed lower left: Johan König fecit
- oil on copper
Provenance
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 12 December 1984, lot 49, for £49,500.
Catalogue Note
König's dramatic landscape setting for the Biblical subject, which is confined to the immediate right foreground, includes a walled town on the right bank of a river immediately above a large waterfall. He may have had in mind the city of Schaffhausen on the Upper Rhine, and its famous Falls. The setting is comparable, but is not a topographical representation, as Dr. Walther Bernt suggested in 1976.
This is likely to be a mature work, painted after König's return from Rome to settle in Augsburg in 1614. A comparable signed panoramic landscape with The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted by König on a slightly smaller copper plate, was sold in these Rooms, 13 December 2001, for £390,000. Another similar landscape on copper with Tobias and the Angel is in Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle.
This is likely to be a mature work, painted after König's return from Rome to settle in Augsburg in 1614. A comparable signed panoramic landscape with The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, painted by König on a slightly smaller copper plate, was sold in these Rooms, 13 December 2001, for £390,000. Another similar landscape on copper with Tobias and the Angel is in Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle.