Sylvan Landscape

Karel Postl

Karel Postl - Sylvan Landscape
In the Wooded Landscape, Karel Postl harks back to 17th−century Dutch landscape painting, regarded in its time as one of the two major landscape traditions. In the aesthetics and arts around 1800, landscape motifs received increased attention, with complex theories evolving around it. In his composition, Postl used the picturesque or sentimental motif of a dead tree that alludes to the transience of life, while evoking melancholic feelings in the viewer. The figures in the foreground are turned with their backs to the observer and serves to mediate contact between the painting and the beholder. Seen in the very front are details of vegetation that alluded to the close relationship between nature and Man, or perhaps represented open arms, so to speak, or refuge for human beings. The natural elements are not confronted with human history here, but are intended as something primeval, original and essential, in a similar sense as the ideas upheld by the French philosopher and adherent to the concept of the state of nature, Jean Jacques Rousseau.
date:
measurements: height 630 mm
width 465 mm
in collections:
material: paper
inscription:
inventory number: K 1035
gallery collection: Collection of Prints and Drawings