FRANZ INNOCENZ KOBELL (1749-1822)

A ROMANTIC LANDSCAPE STUDY
Pen & ink over black chalk
18 x 26 cm
 
PROVENANCE:
With Hal O’Nians, London;
Private Collection, Southeast England
 
 
 
 
Franz Kobell was at first destined for a career as a merchant at his parents’ wishes, perhaps because his brother had already pursued art and they wished to have at least one son with a steady income. It was not long however before he too would go down that path, and he studied under his older brother Ferdinand and at the Mannheim Drawing Academy. Together, Ferdinand and Franz travelled around the Palatinate together on sketching trips, before Franz sent an ambitious request to the Elector asking for support for a trip to Rome, a request which was duly granted. Kobell spent five years in Rome his Roman sojourn, he became entranced by the idealised landscapes of Claude and Poussin, influences which would inform his art for his entire career. 
 
 
He was a prolific draughtsman, and tended to work in pen & ink with wash, producing hundreds if not thousands of small-scale sketches (the Städel Museum in Frankfurt alone has 605 works associated with him), often based on strict compositional principles: here a romantic waterfall, there a dramatic cliff-edge, all in a brisk and effortless medley of sharp lines that are immediately recognisable as his work to collectors. Goethe himself knew and liked Kobell’s work, writing ‘know . . . his drawings, which he executes in a style all of his own, with great speed and in extraordinary numbers. They show that he has understood and felt nature with a highly trained eye’.