Lot 397
George Hetzel (German/Pennsylvania, 1826-1899), "Creek in the Woods", oil on canvas, signed lower right, "Pittsburgh Art Co." label with title and artist en verso, 28 in. x 20 in., framed. Note: After being brought to Pennsylvania at age 2, Hetzel at 21 was encouraged by his parents to return for study at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, under its long-time director Wilhelm von Schadow (1788-1862) and the many figurative and landscape painters who had made it the most prestigious German school. His close contemporaries there included native artists of plein-air landscapes such as Oswald Achenbach (1827-1905), the great Swiss painter Arnold Böchlin (1827-1901), the even more gifted Anselm Feuerbach (1829-1880), and also Werner Homberg (1830-1860), who brought to their favored medium the historic influence of Dutch landscapes. After his 1849 return to Pittsburgh, Hetzel painted a strongly-bearded Self-Portrait, with his eyes obscured by the shadow of a black top hat: its combination of intense chiaroscuro (in which he had specialized at Düsseldorf), with its overtones of Romantic Realism, combine with a striking similarity to the many Self-Portraits of the 1840s by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877) to suggest that Hetzel also had full awareness of contemporary developments in Parisparticularly of the Barbizon School, which his own landscapes came more and more to resemble. The present large painting of Paint Creek in Cambria County, PA, brilliantly reflects Hetzels delight in the 1866 discovery of his own Forest of Fontainebleau, near the village of Scalp Level, just south of Johnstown. To that sylvan retreat he brought so many colleagues from the Pittsburgh School of Design that it became the center of its own Barbizon-like group, who rendered its unspoiled glades in both small plein-air oil sketches, as well as larger studio works. This painting in fact combines the best of both techniques, with its shimmering coruscation of colorconstituting a veritable symphony of greenswith inspired unities and contrasts of value. Ref.: Chew, Paul. George Hetzel and the Scalp Level Tradition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994; Novotny, Fritz. Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1780-1880. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1960.
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