Ideallandschaft (Idealized Landscape), 1791

Caspar Schneider trained as a painter with Joseph Heideloff the Younger,¹ among others. Heideloff was custodian of the Eltz Collection in Mainz, a major collection of German, Italian, French and Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century.² When Heideloff accepted an appointment to the court in Vienna, his pupil filled the post he had hitherto held in Mainz. Entrusted with the care and conservation of the Eltz Collection, Schneider was henceforth able to study the paintings close up and to produce copies of them.³ This idealized landscape bathed in atmospheric sunlight was painted in 1791, a year before French troops laid siege to Mainz, forcing the artist to flee to Düsseldorf. Resting on the foreground lakeshore is a pair of shepherds with their animals. The ruin atop the mighty promontory behind them is lit up by golden sunbeams. The isolated trees that are either clinging to the bare rock or have crashed down onto the shore serve to underscore just how rugged and perilous the terrain is. Behind that ancient edifice, evidently long since abandoned to its fate, is a zone of dense vegetation marking the transition to the high mountains rising up behind it. By subtly staggering the colour of the tree crowns, which having begun as green become at first bluer and then silvery-grey, Schneider succeeds masterfully at amplifying the sense of depth generated by these lofty peaks. The vegetation and mountain farthest away from us are captured using a sfumato-like technique, which besides stablizing the work, lends the composition as a whole a certain intimacy. Both the stage-like arrangement and pastoral staffage of the foreground and the diagonal thrust of the composition generated by the mountains on the left suggest that Schneider was inspired by the landscapes of Claude Lorrain,⁴ whose influence he would have been able to study in many of the works in the Eltz Collection.⁵ Unlike Lorrain, however, Schneider dispenses with a view into the far distance, though the trees on the right obscuring it are beautifully backlit by the evening sun.