How Friedrich Nerly continued to enchant landscape painting

“Quasi Suo Concittadino”, “a fellow citizen, so to speak, called him the” Gazzetta di Venezia “in her obituary for Friedrich Nerly. He died in 1878 after he had lived and worked in Venice for 40 years.

It was a time because one could not acquire civil rights through simple changes in housing like today, but had to earn it.

Nerly had more than deserved its Venetians. Because he had not only painted the city incessantly, in shiny and off -the -pace views, rather he had created an idea of ​​the lagoon city, which should remain widely valid.

Not that he would have invented Venice, so to speak; But he gave the shadowy pictures that were available for Venice.

Friedrich Nerly was born in Erfurt in 1807, and the Angermuseum there – named in the city center after its address – is currently organizing the most comprehensive retrospective that has ever been given to the painter.

The prerequisite for this is the lucky fact that the son bequeathed the painter’s estate in 1883 to his hometown. But so far it needed that this huge treasure could be lifted and made accessible to the public.

Although in four years of work – including the restoration of central works – the exhibition “Friedrich Nerly. From Erfurt to the world “right now at a favorable time.

The jubilee year for Caspar David Friedrich, which has just come to an end, has enormously strengthened the sensorium for romantic landscape painting in the broadest sense. Nerly is not a successor to Friedrich – she doesn’t exist anyway – but his painting is a logical development.

Nerly became famous with his views of Venice in the moonlight – a motive that plays a major role in Friedrich, but is undressed by Nerly of all religious connotation and becomes a tourist signing.

Nerly’s way of life is thus in parallel to the social upheaval of the 19th century, the coming up of bourgeois society with its tourism. Venice changes from the dream structure to the travel destination.

And what the travelers who had only been wealthy for a long time had experienced them home. Nerly does not provide Veduten like Canaletto, but mood painting: How the moon is shouted at the Piazzetta between Markusplatz and Lagune, with shadow throwing and more precisely figure drawing.

Outside anchor sailing ships on which the square hikes – of course – only Venetians, and also in the famous Café Florian, the first of its kind, locals run, while it was actually nerly who received its prospective customers here.

The Venice views can be seen in the upper of the exhibition distributed on two floors, including three Piazzetta pictures of up to 36 versions that Nerly may have created over the course of decades.

The curators Claudia Denk and Thomas von Taschitzki did true detective work to find the scattered paintings and to combine them with their own treasure mainly in drawings and studies.

In any case, this is exactly what Nerly has for today’s standards. Because while the paintings carried out with their arrangements and staff figures could easily apply to historical stage sets, Nerly shows itself in the drawings and studies made for their own use as artists.

Already as a young man, brought to Hamburg as a half -orphaned and trained there before he went on a trip and spent seven years in Rome from 1828, this second home of German artists of the 19th century, Nerly is watching the finest details.

There is a realism that is not inferior to the Frenchman Corot, for example in the perspective of a Roman aqueduct in Campagna. His plant studies are overwhelming.

Light and shadow are used masterfully, the difficult backlight also masters nerly perfectly. But above all: Nerly is an open -air painter. He goes out and paints.

So also from 1837 in Venice. There he turns to the common Venice picture, in addition to splendid attitudes on his place of residence, the Palazzo Grimaldi, the picturesque, as contemporary John Ruskin-whom he may have known.

Nerly draws the foundations attacked by the water and the exposed walls of the Palazzi, has the view for unnoticed islands like Sant Elena and for those who brought one there at the time, the gondoliers boot in their paint blacks.

These, even in their often stretched formats, are highly independent work that today address more than the late romantic topoi of Silbermond or red -glowing sunset.

In any case, the Erfurt audience loves “his” nerly, the visit is lively, and in view of the varied hanging of the times small, then there is no fatigue despite the abundance. Nerly is clearly a (re) discovery.