Heroic Landscape with Rainbow

Joseph Anton Koch

1824 · Oil on canvas · European Paintings

The classically-trained painter Joseph Anton Koch was a father-figure to many German-speaking artists who visited Rome in the early nineteenth century. He renewed the genre of heroic landscape painting, which had been established by the seventeenth-century French masters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Koch’s fame rests on this iconic image, which he referred to as a “Greek landscape.” It is the fourth and final version of a composition he first painted in 1805 (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe).

Artist

Joseph Anton Koch

Date

1824

Medium

Oil on canvas

Department

European Paintings

Credit line

Purchase, Anne Cox Chambers Gift, Gift of Alfred and Katrin Romney, by exchange, and Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art Funds, 2008