Kronberg mit Blick auf Falkenstein (Kronberg with View of Falkenstein), 1849

Johann Christian Heerdt was a pupil at Heinrich Friedrich Höffler's drawing school in his hometown of Frankfurt, after which he studied first at the Städel School and then, starting in 1836, in the class of Johann Wilhelm Schimer at the Düsseldorf Academy.¹ It was through the influence of his friend and fellow painter Heinrich Funk that Heerdt discovered landscape painting.² Together with Funk, Heerdt returned to Frankfurt, where besides working as an artist in his own right, he also gave lessons at various art schools. Paintings of his with motifs from the Rhine, the Taunus mountains, Upper Bavaria and Tyrol have survived.³ The work under discussion here is a study for two more expansive views of Old Kronberg, both of which are impressive depictions of a village much beloved of artists. One of them, dating from 1852 and presumably painted in Heerdt’s Frankfurt studio, belongs to the Historisches Museum Frankfurt,⁴ while the second, much larger, work is in private hands.⁵ Whereas for our work, the artist selected a southerly vantage point that would afford him a view over the rooftops towards Falkenstein in the far distance, for the studio paintings he positioned himself further back so as to include Kronberg Castle on top of the hill on the right. The two studio works also show him modulating the bright sunlight of the study to permit sharper contrasts in the play of light and shade.

Having been in family hands without interruption since 1900, this painting, it seems, was not previously known to Heerdt scholars and hence is not listed in the literature.