GOTTLIEB SCHICK
(Germany, 1776-1812)

Allegory of the Divine Beauty of Nature, circa 1809, Rome
Oil on canvas/ 50 x 67 inches (128 x 170 cm.)

Gottlieb Schick's poetic synthesis of Neo-classical form and Romantic content place him, with Joseph Anton Koch(his fellow expatriate in Rome), among the important few painters of the German Neo-classic movement. He began his art studies in his native Stuttgart (1795-7)under the classically-oriented painter Friedrich von Hetsch, who had been a pupil of Jacques-Louis David. From 1799 to 1802, Schick trained in Paris under David and quickly became one of the master's favorite students. During his Paris period, Schick began to develop a more romantic personal style, closer to Poussin, turning away from David's moralistic and political themes. In 1802, assisted by a pension from Frederick II, Duke of Wurttemburg, Schick moved to Rome where he achieved notable success during the last ten years of his life. He is often considered, along with his friend Koch, an important member of the Nazarene Circle of German and Austrian artists working in Rome during the first decades of the 19th century.

According to Dr. Ingrid Sattel Bernardini, in her opinion which concurs with Fred Kline's attribution and assigns authorship to Schick, the newly discovered Allegory of the Divine Beauty of Nature (circa 1809, Rome) may be the lost and undescribed second commission ordered from Schick by Joachim Murat, Napoleon's brother-in-law and one of his most famous marshals, who was then Joachim I Napoleon, King of Naples(1808-1815). As Schick's likely invention, the subject—a tree nymph appealing to an astonished woodcutter for the conjoined life of the tree and her own life-suggests a further development of the artist's "divine origin" theme, plausibly representing here an allegory of "the divine origin of the beauty of nature and its first manifestation to a human being"(using Schick's descriptive phrasing for Apollo, a related picture). Indeed, this work may be the third and final painting in an allegorical series of "divine origin" pictures by Schick. The first of the series, Eve (1800, Paris; Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne), can be seen as a Biblical allegory of the divine origin of the senses(touch), depicting the newly-born Eve's delicate first step into the cool waters of Eden. The second and key work of the series, Apollo Among the Shepherds (1806-8, Rome; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart), Schick himself described, according to Ernst Platner(his first biographer), as "a symbol of the divine origin of poetry and its first manifestation to human beings". With the discovery of Allegory of the Divine Beauty of Nature—a major addition to the artist's body of work which numbers under forty paintings—Schick further develops his romantic vision of the genesis of human feeling.

Sold to Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College