Jakob Philipp Hackert

Exhibitions:

• Birds & Beasts

Essay:

Jakob Philipp Hackert was the son of Philipp Hackert, the portraitist. Jakob worked initially with his father and subsequently with his uncle in Berlin as well as Blaise Nicolas Le Sueur in the Berlin Akademie. These formative years in the Akademie were important for the development of his landscape painting as he spent a great deal of time studying and copying the work of the Dutch old masters as well as those of Claude Lorrain. In 1762 he was invited to Sweden by Adolf Friedrich von Olthof, the Swedish Councillor. He spent three happy years in Sweden before moving to Paris in 1765. Once established in France he gained a fine reputation for his perspective views.

Having travelled to Italy with his brother in 1768, Hackert stayed there for most of his life, moving between Rome, Naples and Florence. He gained a great many commissions, notably from Catherine the Great of Russia and Ferdinand of Naples, to whom he was appointed court painter in 1786. Sadly in 1799 he had to flee Naples from invading French troops and spent his final years in Florence, acquiring a small estate in S. Piero di Careggi nearby, where he not only continued to paint landscapes but also was able to indulge his passion for engraving. At around this time he is known to have befriended Goethe, whose opinions and advice were to prove fairly influential in his use of colour. Perhaps his finest publication was the 'Traité pour l'instruction de la peinture de paysage', published in 1803.

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Claudia Nordhoff writes that Hackert painted small-format animal portraits throughout his life and that this production reached its peak after his escape from French-occupied Naples in 1799. Hackert had a stroke of luck and was able to live into the house of Jane Woodburn, a friend of his, in the small town of Settignano near Florence. On 28 September 1802 the painter wrote to another friend in Berlin:

"Not far from the city [Florence] 4 miles from Settimiano, an English friend, Madame Woodburn, has a country house with two farm buildings, which she left me 17 months during her absence in England to enjoy her country house, where I paint goats, donkeys and oxen according to nature, but so that they become finished pictures. Also rocks and foregrounds." (Translated from German).

While our picture is undated it is stylistically closer to the animal pictures which Hackert produced in this late period in the 1800s when he was staying in San Piero dei Careggio near Florence. These exhibit warm Claudian tones and energetic brushwork. Similar paintings of goats produced earlier in his career around the 1770s have a cooler palette and are less expressive in their execution. It is testament to Hackert's prolific output of goat paintings that Augusto Nicodemo (1761-1807) in his portrait of the artist dated 1797 ['Jacob Philipp Hackert in his Atelier', Gemäldegalerie Berlin, Inv.-Nr. A I 991] felt compelled to include a goat in a landscape on the wall behind him.

Provenance:

Private collection, Austria