Cavalry under a cloudy sky Johann Adam Klein

In 1811, Johann Adam Klein had come to the Academy in Vienna on the recommendation of the Nuremberg art dealer Johann Friedrich Frauenholz; although he studied diligently there, his real interest lay in the colourful hustle and bustle of the city: ‘I was very interested in the lively traffic on Vienna’s main squares and marketplaces and the various picturesque national costumes of the Hungarians, Poles, Wallachians and Austrians, together with their carts,’ Klein wrote in his autobiography in 1833. He ceaselessly filled his sketchbook with sketches and drawings of such picturesque scenes, which also included the colourful military parades and encampments of the various troops present in Vienna in 1813 and 1814. In Vienna, Klein developed into a chronicler of the troops involved in the Wars of Liberation; however, he did not depict battles, but rather the colourful appearance of their various uniforms – an activity which he continued, partly in collaboration with his friend Johann Christoph Erhard, after his return to Nuremberg in 1815. In October 1815, they jointly sketched Russian Uhlans encamped in the open, who had halted their retreat due to Napoleon’s return from Elba, as well as other troops of the anti-Napoleonic coalition passing through Nuremberg. Our unfinished watercolour also stems from such closely observed studies; it derives its particular charm from the juxtaposition of precise pen drawing and the finely nuanced watercolour rendering of the sky, which has settled darkly over the troops. Mighty and menacing, weighing heavily upon the scene, the outlying edges of the storm clouds drift away; on the right, the sky is already breaking, revealing a glimpse of the azure sky. The drama of the celestial spectacle is met with a relaxed response by the horsemen – Austrian cuirassiers – who are depicted in their uniforms with meticulous detail; unimpressed by the receding storm that still looms menacingly above them, they watch their retreating troops against the lightly sketched, pencil-outlined silhouette of a hilly landscape. The juxtaposition of the finished and the unfinished has become a compositional principle of artistic experience in Romantic landscape art, in which the fragment of nature corresponded to the Romantic worldview. However, this ‘principle of the unfinished’ (Reinhard Wegner) can only be applied to our watercolour to a limited extent, as the juxtaposition of the finished and the unfinished was not originally intended: Whilst Klein has completed the stormy sky, the landscape and the cuirassiers – rendered with precise pen-and-ink outlines, amongst whom a few civilians are mingled – have remained unfinished; like the surrounding landscape, they were intended to be coloured in with watercolour, but for unknown reasons this was never done. Whilst the juxtaposition of the finished and the unfinished may seem highly appealing to today’s eye, trained by modernism, it was not originally intended. Today, however, the unfinished watercolour affords us an insight into Klein’s carefully calculated working process: in a loose pencil sketch, Klein first laid out the silhouette of the landscape and the troops marching in the foreground – they are still visible in those places where they are not obscured by the cuirassiers and the civilians standing alongside them. This group is not based on any study from life, but was arranged in the studio, probably from individual studies made from life. In a second step, Klein then painted the dramatically charged stormy sky, leaving out their heads and upper bodies; however, he did not follow this approach consistently, as towards the right-hand edge there is some overlap with the two cuirassiers and the figure with his back turned wearing a hat, and where he does not continue the sky – perhaps they no longer corresponded to his original pictorial concept, which is why he refrained from completing the work further. Watercolour was particularly well-suited to ‘capturing what is perceived at the very moment of perception’ (Peter Märker), especially for fleeting phenomena such as the drama of a receding stormy sky. It still seems to express the ever-present threat posed by the many troops stationed outside the gates of Nuremberg at the time, yet peace appears to be laying down – the blue sky opens up as the embodiment of this hope. For, on the whole, Klein depicts a peaceful scene in which military personnel and civilians interact. The cuirassiers on the right are in conversation with a gentleman on horseback; to the left of them, a Hungarian infantryman – presumably – is speaking to another cuirassier, whilst in front of them a mother and her child have gathered beside an officer to watch the troops withdraw. The group is already reminiscent of the ‘encounter’ paintings by Wilhelm von Kobell, who depicted different social classes coming together in the Bavarian Alps or on Lake Tegernsee – usually with people of higher standing on horseback chance upon the rural population. Klein, too, depicts such scenes in the expansive landscape in a rather chance and casual manner, as a fusion of landscape and genre painting, something the artist always strove for. Dr Peter Prange | 1792 Nürnberg - München 1875 | 19. Jahrhundert | Arbeiten auf Papier | Nummer: 26x2053 | Provenance: Privatsammlung, Deutschland; Privatsammlung, Süddeutschland.

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