A month ago in this column I was examining an icon – one of Raphael’s most famous paintings the Sistine Madonna. This week I shall be looking at a lithograph produced by J.H.Ferdinand Oliver an artist who many of you may not have heard of. He was German and lived between 1785 and 1841. He eventually joined the Fraternity of the Nazarenes– a grouping of artists who rejected neoclassicism and wanted artists to espouse the spiritual and religious values of a much earlier period being particularly influenced by artists of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
J.H.Ferdinand Oliver and Friday – Meadow outside of Aigen near Salzburg (1822) (Lithograph produced from two plates, in black and tan inks, overall size 370 mm x 525 mm)
Ferdinand Oliver often expressed the relationship between mankind and God through pictures of idyllic rural scenes. Some, such as Friday, show workers taking their time tending the crops and presenting a very relaxed view of working in the countryside which is actually very far from the truth. In this respect Oliver demonstrated a kinship with Samuel Palmer who as you know is one of my specialist interests and in his time at Shoreham produced similar idyllic scenes as I have demonstrated in earlier reflections. Other paintings by Oliver such as On the Frauensteinberg at Mödling (1823) and St Peter’s Graveyard in Salzburg (1818) show a similarity with the work of that other specific interest of mine, Casper David Friedrich but without the melancholy which is such a characteristic of the latter’s work. Although he spent most of his time in Germany rather than Italy, Oliver was a member of the Nazarines or Brotherhood of St.Luke and most of his works have a Biblical, Catholic reference; his views are much more in accord with that Brotherhood than with the Friedrich-Carus grouping in Dresden.
Concentrating now on Friday, the picture shows three workers in the right hand foreground balanced by a tower in the left foreground. In the middle distance there are three more workers, possibly taking a crop of hay, beyond which there are a number of trees dotted about as in parkland and in the far distance there are the mountains of the Salzkammergut The sky is shown with a very high thin stratus cloud indicative of fair weather.
The tower is particularly important as it links this ‘Garden of Eden’ scene to Christianity. The tower emphasises the Cross, with a simple cross showing in the brick or stone work at an intermediate level above which there is enclosed a crucifix with two people with heads bowed at its base. The space containing the crucifix is built with four columns and lintels, the whole being surmounted by a pitched roof at the pinnacle of which there is a further simple cross. The disposition of the workers is such as to suggest with a reference to Genesis 3: 24 that they are tilling the ground from which they were taken. The whole scene is one of an elegiac, utopian existence where there is a simple Pietist pleasure in looking after the land which God has created. Cordula Grewe interprets this timeless, peaceful scene:
The topographical exactitude contrasts to a strange, lyrical sense of timelessness, which extracts a sensation of permanence from the season’s never-ending cycle of change. Signs of popular piety, such as the wayside cross … underscore the religious air of Oliver’s invention and create such an acute sense of symbolism that the viewer feels compelled to read all of nature as a Christian metaphor.[i]
In addition to this one could add the thought there is in this timelessness a feeling of renewal or resurrection, particularly in view of the crucifix scene enclosed at the top of the tower. Contemplation of this Christian metaphor would surely enhance an act of devotion in a viewer or worshipper who is susceptible to communication with the Ultimate Reality through the depiction of the created world.
At this juncture it is appropriate to quote once again from Grewe who summarised the aspirations of the Lukasbrüder or Nazarines as follows:
The individual (art)work served as an expression, a vessel of the artist’s own religiosity. Making art was synonymous with praying, it was a personal and private form of divine service. Moreover, the artwork was a devotional tool meant to serve the devout in their need for reminders, instruction and confirmation in the teachings of Bible and Church. Third, it was a missionary device in place to convert the unbelievers. Through these … stages, art helped to form the artist’s identity, re-enchant society, and ultimately bring about the Kingdom of God on earth. This, at least, was the Nazarene ideal.[ii]
As artists began to express themselves more through landscape, it was necessary to consider the place of landscape within the panoply of fine art because at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries landscape painting was still rising to the level accorded to history painting. The scientist and artist pupil and friend of Friedrich, Carl Gustav Carus in addressing this point, endeavoured to raise the reputation of this form of art by creating a new title for this category – earth-life painting or earth-life art. Carus writes a fitting end to this short reflection on Oliver and the Nazarenes
When the soul is saturated with the inner meaning of all these different (organic) forms; when it has clear intimations of the mysterious, divine life of nature; when the hand has taught itself to represent securely, and the eye to see purely and acutely; and when the artist’s heart is purely and entirely a consecrated, joyous vessel in which to receive the light from above: then there will infallibly be earth-life paintings … These works will truly deserve to be named mystic and orphic; and earth-life painting will have attained its culmination[iii].
[i] Grewe, Cordula Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism. Farnham. Ashgate Publishing 2009 p. 262.
[ii] Ibid. p. 301.
[iii] Carus, C.G. Nine letters on Landscape Painting (Introduction by Oskar Bätschmann) Los Angeles, CA The Getty Research Institute 2002 p.30. Batschmann quoting Carus.
Brislington Community News 