Rudolph von Alt

Anonymous sale, ("Private Collection, Vienna"), London, Christie's, 13 October 1994, lot 44;
Where purchased by the present collector for £43,110.

For a high resolution digital image, please refer to the online catalogue at Sothebys.com or contact a member of the Old Master Paintings department. On a substantial wove paper. there are light diagonal scratches, mainly in the grass foreground at lower right, most of which have been touched in. there is a tiny crease across lower left corner and another at upper right corner. a repaired tear is at the upper edge at center (just visible in the catalogue illustration). a few tiny fox marks in sky and two short pressure marks in sky at upper left. the overall impression is very attractive and painting can be hung as is. Offered in a gilt wood frame with blue matt.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Von Alt trained with his father, Jakob and swiftly became known as the most gifted watercolorist of his time.  From the tender age of 6 he accompanied his father on study trips but it was at the age of 20, when travelling to Italy without his father, that he first visited Venice, a city that would greatly influence his artistic output from that moment on: “In the year 33 I saw the Italian cities Verona, Vicenza, Padua and Venice for the first time – I cannot describe what an impression particularly the latter made on me - I felt I had to absorb its whole romanticism”¹  In this landscape, painted the following year, we see the impact of his Venetian sojourn through the artist’s atmospheric light and heightened color. 

Von Alt’s 1870 View from the Kapuzinerberg of Salzburg now in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich (inv. no.  45.179), predates the present painting and shows the city from beyond the river Salach, again including figures and shrubbery in the foreground.  In 1870 the artist completed his View of Wien from Krapfenwald, again in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich (inv. no. 45.594) in which he painted Vienna from a vineyard overlooking the city.

1.  W. Koschatzky (ed.), Rudolf von Alt, 1812-1905 : die schönsten Aquarelle aus den acht Jahrzehnten seines Schaffens, exhibition catalogue, Vienna 1984, p. 39