The Grove of Egeria near Rome
  • Franz Albert Venus
  • Dresden 1842 - 1871
  • The Grove of Egeria near Rome, ca. 1866
  • Watercolour over pen and brown ink and pencil, on paper
  • collector’s mark on the verso (Lugt 2841a)
  • 305 × 485 mm
Provenance:
Collection Carl Heumann (1886-1945), Chemnitz
The Heumann Family, Frankfurt/Zurich
Sale Kornfeld, Bern, June 2004, lot 79 (ill.)
Kunsthandel Thomas Le Claire, Hamburg
Exhibition:
Breslau 1933, Schlesisches Museum der Bildenden Künste: Deutsche Landschaftskunst 1750-1850, Zeichnungen und Aquarelle aus der Sammlung Carl Heumann Chemnitz, cat. no. 68 (as Victor Paul Mohn)

In 1866, three of Ludwig Richter’s (1803-1884) students set off at his suggestion for a joint study trip to Italy. On this journey, Carl Müller, Victor Paul Mohn and Albert Venus developed together an eccentric, pictorial space-compressing technique of watercolour painting that today counts as one of the most beautiful particularities of late German Romanticism. The young artists apparently worked shoulder-to-shoulder, as a second version of this view from Victor Paul Mohn’s hand attests1.

The false attribution of our sheet from the 1930s to Mohn was corrected even earlier than 1945, while it was still in Carl Heumann’s collection, according to a labeled photo report from the National Gallery in Berlin.

The Valle di Egeria lies near the Via Appia southeast of Rome, and ranked as early as the 19th century as one of the favoured day-trip destinations for artists living there. The name goes back to an ancient monument in the villa of Herodes Atticus.