Caspar Schneider

Mainz, Landesmuseum, Arkadien am Mittelrhein. Caspar und Georg Schneider, 7 June – 23 August 1998, no. 35;

Wiesbaden, Museum Wiesbaden; Regensburg, Schnell & Steiner, Rheinromantik: Kunst und Natur, 22 March–28 July 2013, no. 138.

Caspar Schneider was born in Mainz in 1753. As a landscape specialist, he primarily captured views near his hometown along the Rhine and the Main rivers (see also lot 90) and even garnered the praise of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who visited the region in 1814.

The present view, a peaceful and beautiful vista of Mainz from the South, abounds in Schneider’s characteristic attention to detail. He records the scene from the former site of the Schloss Favorite, a castle complex built between 1700-1720 by Lothar Franz von Schönborn, Elector of Mainz, and destroyed in 1793 during the Napoleonic wars. Only the ruins of the castle are visible in the foreground of this painting, which Schneider painted in 1815. Filling the centre of the scene is the Rhine River, upon which sail several vessels, including one that flies a Dutch flag. In the left middle-distance is a silhouette of Mainz, with Saint Stephen’s Cathedral at the far left and Saint Peter’s Church, with its double onion dome towers, closer to the river’s edge. Faintly visible in the centre distance, along the other bank of the Rhine, is Biebrich Palace, the Baroque Chateau built in 1702 by Prince Georg August Samuel of Nassau-Idstein. In addition to the topographical accuracy captured here by Schneider, he further enlivens his scene with figures going about their daily lives. In addition to the bourgeois couples near the river’s edge in the right foreground, a shepherd and his flock rest near the ruins at left, several young boys swim along the bank, laundresses bleach fabrics in the fields, and men attend to their duties on ships. 

In 1815, Schneider also painted a small gouache of the same view, today preserved in the Landesmuseum in Darmstadt (inv. no. Hz 370).