Jungblut, Johann (1860-1912), Winter landscape with frozen river, c. 1900
Johann Jungblut(1860 Saarburg - 1912 in Düsseldorf), Winter landscape with frozen river , around 1900. Oil on panel, 35 x 26 cm (panel), 48 x 40 cm (frame), signed “J. Jungblut:” lower left.
- Sky with occasional retouches, otherwise in excellent condition and attractively framed.
- The home of melancholy -
The picture transports us to a gray winter landscape, which is by no means monotonous. Johann Jungblut succeeds in creating the finest atmospheric differentiations within the gray tonality, resulting in an intense pictorial mood. The frozen river leads the viewer's gaze into the depths of the picture, where the world gradually dissolves into the diffuse. The defoliated branches become increasingly blurred, yet the horizon line remains clearly defined, and we believe that we can still recognize the landscape even at the limits of what is visible.
As the landscape diffuses into the depths, its contours become visibly sharper toward the front. In contrast to the trees behind the farmer's cottage, the branches of the two trees in front of it are straight and sharp, and the virtuoso white strokes in the foreground look like clearly recognizable scratches in the surface of the ice on which the farmers are reflected. This light effect refers to the sun, which seems to have disappeared behind the clouds at the height of the treetops. The world is bathed in a darkened, scattered light, ultimately also only vaguely present in the foreground, which Jungblut skillfully renders with broad brushstrokes.
The world is immersed in an all-encompassing atmosphere of winter melancholy. It is frozen, as the icy surface indicates. The winter landscape, crisscrossed by ravens, becomes an allegory of death, from which even the farmer's cottage offers no refuge. The supplies have been used up, and the empty basket must be filled again. The couple walks through the dead world, the reflection anticipating the path they will finally take out of this world.
Despite the melancholy and gloomy mood of an alienated dead world, the painting conveys the feeling of being at home in a pervasive togetherness. In addition to the dwelling, which stands for home, the two trees in front of the house refer to the man and the woman. The pair of trees is at the same height as the farming couple. There are no other trees in front of the house, only this pair, which enters into an allegorical analogy with the peasant couple. While the trunks represent the two individuals, which are also slightly offset, the branches intertwine at the top to form a single treetop. Jungblut alludes to the myth of Philemon and Baucis from Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which the couple live on as a pair of trees after their death.
With the painting before us, Jungblut has created an atmospherically dense landscape that is all the more captivating because it is also an allegory of life and love.
About the artist
Johann Jungblut, today one of the most famous landscape painters of the Düsseldorf School, first worked for Villeroy & Boch in Mettlach, but this did not fulfill him artistically. In 1885, at the age of twenty-five, he moved to the art metropolis of Düsseldorf to devote himself to painting.
His work was particularly inspired by Dutch landscape painting, which he studied in detail on several trips to Holland. He also traveled to the Norwegian fjord landscape, discovered by the Düsseldorf School as an artistic motif, which at the time formed the Nordic counterpart to Italy as a place of longing.
Jungblut developed a characteristic style that combined Romanticism with the colorful atmospheres of Impressionism, making him a sought-after artist.
He sometimes signed his work with the pseudonym J. M. Sander. He was the father of the sculptor Emil Jungblut and the painters Hans and Walter Jungblut.