RKD STUDIES

Genre painting finds the connection to the Dutch masters in an easier and more natural fashion, in the same way that many portraitists became Dutch spontaneously, when they liberated themselves from the official court portrait, in order to paint daily life or ‘ordinary people’, like themselves or their colleagues. Philipp Jacob Nickhl, a Kupezky pupil active in Salzburg in the 1740s, painted among others a series of the Five Senses, which is not only well depicted spatially, but even in one case copies a Dutch composition [1-3].¹

The Saxon Basilius Grundmann (1726-1798) learned the Dutch way from his teacher Dietrich, after whose etchings he painted. He was active in Vienna and Hungary in the 1760s and created very curious genre paintings, that show a mixture of Adriaen van Ostade and Frans van Mieris [4-6].² Dutch engravings by Cornelis Visscher II supplied him with a depiction of the Seller of Rat Poison and from David Teniers II and Jan Josef Horemans I he got suggestions for pictures with kitchen scenes and larders.

1
possibly Philipp Jacob Nickhl after Johann Heinrich Schönfeld
Man playing a violin: Hearing, dated 1743
Salzburg, Salzburg Museum

The ‘Viennese Dorner’, however, was Adam Braun (1748-1827). He framed elegant scenes in the taste of Jacob Ochtervelt and Michiel van Musscher [7-8] with a stone window sill after the recipe of Frans van Mieris and Gerard Dou [9]. Just as with these Leiden painters, young Viennese women, with some grapes, or some dead or alive creature in their hand, look smiling out of a window surrounded with intertwined flower garlands [10].³

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Basilius Grundmann
Interior of a junk shop
Naples, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, inv./cat.nr. 84513

The painters of merry companies Franz Christoph Janneck and Johann Georg Platzer belong to another type of Dutch genre painting, in which Dutch, Flemish and French elements merge. With Johann Georg Platzer (1704-1761)⁴ one thinks first of the Dutch painters of merry companies Anthonie Palamedes, Pieter Codde and Jacob Duck, but the handwriting of Platzer is much more lively and ornate and the contrasts in light and shadow alternate in a playful Rococo banter [11-12].

His playful, mythological paintings, which are nothing but a revitalization of the art of the Mannerists like Joachim Wtewael, brought him the name of an ‘Austrian Goltzius’ [13-15]. Furthermore he must have known and used Flemish genre paintings, from Hans Rottenhammer and Jan Brueghel [16] until Theodor Rombouts and Jan Thomas [17-19], while other paintings show clearly more connections with the art of Sebastiano Ricci. But all the time we recognize in the overcrowded and packed compositions the minor master of Rococo, who feels at home with Adriaen van de Venne as well as with Jan van Balen. Incidentally there are small paintings by the younger Zick, which tell an equally naïve and blithe tale.

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Johann Georg Platzer
The concert, c. 1750
Nuremberg, Germanisches Nationalmuseum, inv./cat.nr. Gm 1321

Franz Christoph Janneck (1703-1761), who had worked in Southern Germany and Frankfurt also, is in his genre scenes [20-22] and landscapes even more Flemish and less witty than Platzer.⁵ He sometimes copied compositions by Rubens and used them in more or less the same way as the Frenchman Antoine Coypel [23-24].

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Franz Christoph Janneck
Elegant company dining in a garden
Bayreuth, Staatsgalerie im Neuen Schloss Bayreuth, inv./cat.nr. 1609