Franz Xaver Winterhalter: Italy

"Study of Italian Girl"
by Franz Xaver Winterhalter

"There is no doubt of the liberating effect which Italy had on Franz Xaver Winterhalter's imagination. In his only surviving letter from Rome, written from the Caffè Greco, on 12 March 1833, he wrote of his delight in the country: 'I will be glad all of my life that I came here.' Free for the first time from the pressures of lithographic work and portrait commissions, he raised his sights to academic composition and embraced new subject matter. His pencil was never still; a surviving sketchbook includes copies from the Old Masters, figure studies, landscapes, and ideas for compositions. Six of his drawings after Michelangelo's figures of prophets and sybils in the Sistine Chapel were later lithographed by Josef Anton Selb and published in a portfolio by Anton Werder in Munich. 

The apparently simple, sensual, uncomplicated lives of the Italian peasants of the south, resplendent in native costume, provided excellent copy for Romantic, Northern painters in love with the Mediterranean. Numbers of German painters, and those of other nationalities, devoted themselves to this popular and profitable genre. Winterhalter threw himself into this enchanted world with enthusiasm, developing a new richness of palette, a new fluency of technique and subtle effects of lighting.

Winterhalter left Rome early in 1834, returning to Karlsruhe not only with saleable pictures but with plans for several large-scale pictures in his mind. Events in his life now moved rapidly." 

To be continued

(Excerpts from the introduction by Richard Ormund, to "Franz Xaver Winterhalter and the Courts of Europe 1830-70.")