Šárka Leubnerová
Piepnehagen’s Samplers: A Serial Production of Landcape Paintings for the Purposes of Business Offers
The text deals with the special position of small landscape compositions in the work of one of the greatest figures of early Romantic landscape painting, August B. Piepenhagen (1791–1868). ?ey were mostly oil paintings of sizes from 3 to 20 cm, carefully worked out in detail and adjusted, put together by the artist himself into representative sample sheets, based on which the customers, who could influence also the details of the future work, made their purchases. Piepenhagen’s practice may be perceived as a demonstration of the marketing skills of an artist of the first half of the 19th century, unique in the Bohemian Lands. The painter offered his landscape paintings not only in Prague but also in Berlin (trader C. Kuhe), in Vienna, in Linz (painter A. Stifter) as well as in other centres of art. The samplers as a thematic source were likewise used by both of his daughters, painters Charlotte and Louisa, later also students of a private landscape-painting school of Charlotte Piepenhagen. The samplers in the original mounts, in which Piepenhagen offered and sent them to his friends, were acquired by the Picture Gallery of the Society of Patriotic Friends of Art (now the National Gallery in Prague) as a donation from the legacy of his daughter Charlotte Piepenhagen in 1905. For the last exhibition of Piepenhagen’s paintings, which took place in St George’s Monastery at Prague Castle in 2009, a large part of these samplers were restored and published in the exhibition catalogue.
Key words: Bohemian Lands, 19th century, painting, Romanticism, samplers
design by Bedřich Vémola
