Caspar Schneider

Anonymous sale, Cologne, Van Ham Kunstauktionen, 26 March 1993, lot 968.

Wiesbaden, Museum Wiesbaden; Regensburg, Schnell & Steiner, Rheinromantik: Kunst und Natur, 22 March–28 July 2013, no. 141.

S. Mertens, Arkadien am Mittelrhein. Caspar und Georg Schneider, exh. cat., Mainz 1998, p. 114, under cat. no. 29, reproduced.

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 89) and even garnered the praise even of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who visited the region in 1814.

This panoramic view by Schneider records a view of the confluence of the Rhine and Main rivers, looking east towards the village of Kostheim in the middle distance at left, Gustavsburg towards the right, and the town of Hochheim along the hill above, which has been raised in a slightly idealised manner. In the lower left foreground, Schneider has included several houses in a neighbourhood at the corner of Mainz as well as some of the city's walled fortifications. Numerous figures populate the foreground, including an elegant, promenading family, several washerwomen, and villagers tending to life in the city. 

Schneider captured a similar view from a slightly different viewpoint in a comparable panoramic work of smaller dimensions today at Sooneck Castle, near Niederheimbach, as part of the Foundation of the Dael-von-Koeth-Wanscheid family.¹

¹ Oil on canvas, 47 x 111 cm.  See Mertens 1998, cat. no. 29.