View of Capo Miseno, Procida and Ischia
  • Franz Ludwig Catel
  • Berlin 1778 - 1856 Rome
  • View of Capo Miseno, Procida and Ischia, ca. 1812
  • Pen and brown ink, partly heightened with white, framing lines with pen and ink, on brownish paper
  • signed and inscribed on the lower right: Franz Catel fec. Nap.,
    old inscription on the verso: Aus C. E. Schaeffers Nachlaß ...
  • 150 × 224 mm
Provenance:
Estate of Carl A. E. Schaeffer (1780-1866), Leobschütz/Silesia
Collection Wilhelm Laaf, Wiesbaden
The Laaf family (until 2014)

Franz Catel’s art found public recognition first in 1802, when Goethe commended several of his watercolour landscapes currently on exhibition in Weimar. After 1805, Catel collaborated for a period with Schinkel in Berlin, and was accepted during the following year into the Royal Academy. He moved in with his brother Ludwig in Paris thereafter, in 1807, in order to study oil painting techniques more extensively. Then, in 1811, Catel moved to Rome, where he connected with the German painters around Joseph Anton Koch (1768-1839). This environment eventually became his permanent home, in which he took substantial organizational action. Lucrative titles and numerous commissions from Prussia and all of Europe ensured a pleasant life for him in Rome, which he interrupted only with periodic study trips to southern Italy. He probably met the Silesian painter Carl Albrecht Eugen Schaeffer there in 1812; after that year, the latter held this sheet in his collection, as recorded in a note on the back of the image. This small drawing would have originated during Catel’s three-month journey through Calabria with the French archaeologist Louis-Aubin Millin, and depicts the famous view of these islands from Capo Posilippo.

We are especially grateful to Dr. Andreas Stolzenburg for confirming the authenticity and for his assistance cataloguing this drawing.