item details
Overview
Johann Christian Reinhart (1761-1847) was a German painter and printmaker. He was one of the founders, along with Joseph Anton Koch and Jacob Mechau - both also represented in Te Papa's print collection - of German romantic classical landscape painting.
Reinhart grew up in Bavaria. In 1783 he moved to Dresden to further his studies, where he concentrated on landscape painting which was to form the main body of his work as an artist. In 1784 he returned to Leipzig, where he got to know the famous writer Friedrich Schiller in 1785. This friendship lasted all his life. From 1786 he spent three years in Meiningen (Thuringia) at the court of Duke Georg of Meinigen, one of the centres of classicism next to Jena and Weimar.
Supported by the hereditary Prince of Coburg-Gotha, he got a grant from the Margrave of Ansbach-Bayreuth which enabled him to go to Italy. In December 1789 he reached Rome, a gathering place for artists at the time. From there, he travelled all over Italy. In 1801 he married an Italian, Anna Caffo and together they had three children. Paintings, drawings and etchings, of which he made many prints, brought him artistic recognition and financial success. In 1839 he was appointed official court painter in Bavaria.
This etching is plate 4 from the series of six Die Römischen Grabdenkmäler (Roman tombs), published in 1792 by Johann Friedrich Frauenholz, one of the most important German art collectors, dealers and publishers of the era. It is a view of the ruins of a round mausoleum known as the Torre di Schiavi (Tower of the Slaves), which dominates the background; in the foreground, there are two hunters with guns; one reclining, the other standing.
Torre di Schiavi is the late 18th/19th century name for the ruins of a large villa said to be built by the Imperial Gordian family, which lived during the third century AD. Located in the Campagna (the countryside surrounding Rome), the villa originally consisted of the mausoleum depicted here, luxurious baths and a large colonnade with three structures. In later centuries the mausoleum was used as a Christian church, and faded frescoes depicting saints could be in Reinhart's time. Near the end of the Roman Empire, the remains of the bath were converted to a military watch tower. A few artists visited the ruins in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the site was largely ignored until archeological investigations began in the nineteenth century. Reinhart's depiction marks the beginnings of such interest. Today the ruins are preserved within an archaeological park.
Sources:
SAAM, 'Q and Art: Torre di Schiavi', https://americanart.si.edu/blog/eye-level/2015/19/405/q-and-art-torre-di-schiavi
See: Web Gallery of Art, 'Reinhart, Johann Christian', https://www.wga.hu/bio_m/r/reinhart/biograph.html
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art February 2019