ALLEGORY OF WATER
(Landscape with Christ’s Miraculous Draught of Fishes)

ALLEGORY OF EARTH
(Landscape with Christ’s Encounter with Mary and Martha)

National Gallery in Prague / Collection of Old Masters

From December 19, 2005 in the permanent exhibition in St George‘s Convent.

The National Gallery in Prague would like to thank the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, in particular the Department of Movable Cultural Heritage, Museums and Galleries, for providing funds for the purchase of two paintings by J. J. Hartmann.

Curator: Marcela Vondráčková
Consultants: Hana Seifertová
Cooperation on restoration: Jiří Třeštík
Graphic layout of printed materials: Pavel Novák

Entrance fee:
Full: 100 CZK
Reduced: 50 CZK
Family: 150 CZK

St. George’s Convent
Jiřské nám. 33
Praha 1

Main media partner: Hospodářské noviny
Financial partner of the Education Departments of NG in Prague: HVB Bank
Partners: Classic FM, ČRO 3– Vltava, Prague Best, Termo, Art & Antiques

The National Gallery’s Collection of Old Masters in Prague succeeded in acquiring, through an auction held at the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna, on 5 October 2005, two companion pieces by Johann Jakob Hartmann (c. 1658 Kutná Hora – 1736/1745 Prague).

This acquisition was made possible thanks to the help of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic which provided funds focused on the purchase of cultural relics and objects of exceptionally significant cultural value from its ISO program. Johann Jakob Hartmann, a significant representative of Bohemian Baroque landscape painting of the archaizing type. The two paintings, composed as pendants, or companion pieces, are conceived as forested landscapes with a distant vista to a river lea. Trees, which fill almost two thirds of each painting, are set into contrast with the river that winds through the valley to distant towns and mountains. The opposite side is enclosed in a background of naked trees growing new leaves. The principles of the composition as well as the arrangement of color plans are taken from the early 17th-century Netherlandish landscape painting which Hartmann closely followed up with. The paintings are variants of the frequently applied landscape scheme “with the edge of a forest” whose effect is based on the contrast between the dark background of a forest growth and a vista, filled with light and opening to free landscape.

Numerous figures, rich in color and rendered in a subtle brushwork, inhabit the space. The bustle of the crowd breaks up to smaller groups, thus creating narrative episodes which are very attractive from a closer look. The everyday activity almost conceals the New Testament scenes depicted. The first example is an image of Christ fishing miraculously, inconspicuously slipped into the river surface, and in the second, a somehow more conspicuously situated scene of the meeting of Christ with Mary and Martha. The fact that, in the forefront, the first painting depicts a bounty of fish and sea-foods spread on the ground and being sold, and the latter captures the sale of fruit and game, suggests that the two works can be interpreted as a pair from the series of Four Elements, i.e., the Allegory of Water and the Allegory of Earth. Similar cycles were highly sought-for by collectors and Hartmann painted them several times, as can be proved by other survived examples. In this respect, they are comparable with companion pieces with the same subject from Landesmuseum in Graz and with four paintings of Elements, executed on wood, held in the collections of Österreichische Galerie in Vienna.

Due to color composition, the solution of space and light and the painstaking rendering of detail, these paintings executed on copper panels of unusual large dimensions, rank among the best of Hartmann’s creative achievements.  Although they are companion pieces, they display certain differences in working with light, the formation of figures and painting technique. Johann Jakob (c. 1680 – after 1736 / before 1745) worked with his sons Franz Anton (1694–1728) and Wenzel Johann (1700–1745) in a family workshop where the paintings were created under the cooperation of all painters. None of them signed their works, which makes it extremely difficult to attribute them to any single artist. Attributing the better and/or more advanced works to the younger Franz Anton and the more traditional ones to the older Johann Jakob is an artificial construction developed in the late 19th century and used until today.

Public Relations Department of the Collection of Old Masters:
Kateřina Boháčová 233 357 332, 606 795 865,
e-mail: bohacova@ngprague.cz
Hradčanské nám. 15, Prague 1, 119 00