Vegetation along a Lake
  • Johann Wilhelm Preyer
  • Rheydt 1803 - 1889 Düsseldorf
  • Vegetation along a Lake, circa 1839
  • Pen and brown ink over pencil, on paper,
    on cardboard (the back of a sketch book)
  • unknwon collector’s stamp on the old mount: Dr. A.S.
  • 153 × 196 mm

Along with his prematurely deceased brother Gustav (1801-1839), Johann Wilhelm Preyer studied under Peter von Cornelius and Wilhelm von Schadow at the academy of art in Düsseldorf. In 1837, both moved with other painter friends to Munich, where they soon enjoyed their artistic breakthrough and initial purchases by the royal family. There, in addition to the fruit still lifes that would later be so famous, they made their characteristic landscape studies after nature. These mostly consist, as in the sheet shown here, of delicate pen drawings of grass, reeds, and trees on the shore of a body of water (Fig. 1). The delicate blades are pushed into the foreground, almost like silhouettes, while the flat landscape seems to vanish in the distance. The sky meanwhile remains cloudless and unstructured, when not populated by small songbirds1.

  1. see S. Weiß / H. Paffrath: Johann Wilhelm und Emilie Preyer,
    Cologne 2009, ill. 50, p. 63