It is a vulgarity of our modern times to dismiss paintings of Romantic landscape and hunting scenes as relics of an obsolete and backwards age. Nostalgia at best, reactionary aesthetics at worst. To reduce naturalism to decorative kitsch means misapprehending it's philosophical weight. The hunt is an archetype as old as Paleolithic cave art. For the cultivated mind realist nature paintings, if painted with soul, are nothing less than ontological diagrams that map the spiritual terrain of a pre-fragmented, archaic world. A world wherein man, beast, and land are entangled in a brutally existentialist cosmology. Similar to allegorical drawings from alchemy, they are to be understood metaphorically. The symbolism calls to be decoded. The unbiased viewer recognizes himself in the eye of the grouse torn apart by a wolf, or the stag defeated in a fight over the doe. He feels for them. By contemplating this art, he is thrown to his essence, his human condition. This is no polemic against modern art btw, but the disregard for these lost works is an insult to the human soul. That being said, let us share these paintings in this thread to offer a space to this cultural treasure on this very last corner of the digital subconscious.
Carl Friedrich Deiker - Hirsch in einer Waldlandschaft bei Sonnenuntergang
Caspar David Friedrich - Uttewalder Grund
Eduard Leonhardi - Waldeinsamkeit
Illustration Gosau-Schlucht (am Wege zum Gosau-See.) gemalt von Bertha von Grab, in Deutsches Künstler-Album, 1874
Deer and Deer Hounds in a Mountain Torrent ('The Hunted Stag'), c. 1832
Sir Edwin Landseer RA (1802-1873)
Landscape with a Footbridge at Moonlight
Charlotte Piepenhagen (1821-1902)
"Perching eagle" (1909) etching with aquatint.
Hans Frank (Austrian, 1884-1948)
Caspar David Friedrich, Willow Bush under a Setting Sun; c. 1832-35
Raufbold (Hirsch), 1938.
Geschenk des Künstlers G. Löbenberg an Hermann Göring.