CATEL, Franz Ludwig

The scene in the tavern illustrates an aspect of life of the German artists in Rome. Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria was a patron of the arts, and here we see him seated with the artists, calling the landlord. The painter wrote in 1824: “I recently finished a small Bamboccia painting for the Crown Prince of Bavaria.. His Royal Highness graciously organized a small dinner at Don Raffaele’s on the Ripa Grande to bid farewell to von Klenze, and he asked me to immortalize the scene with my brush.”

The artists are sitting in a tavern opposite Mount Aventine, and Catel listed the men he has portrayed in a letter: the Crown Prince gesturing to the landlord, beside him Berthel Thorvaldsen, the architect Leo van Klenze, Johann Martin Wagner, who was in Rome to buy antique figures for Munich’s collection, then Philipp Veit, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld and Catel himself.

This painting is typical of those northern painters whose art was transformed by the Italian experience.

The picture shows figures in the garden of the Villa Doria Pamphilj in Rome, with a view of the old church of San Pancrazio. The painting shows the influence of both Johan Christian Dahl’s more naturalist approach to landscape painting, and the continuing legacy of the French painters of the generation following Valenciennes.

The Villa Doria Pamphili was one of several Roman properties of the Doria Pamphili Landi family, including a splendid palace in the Corso, which housed one of the greatest art collections in Italy, another in the Piazza Navona, and the great park and palace of the Villa Doria Pamphili.

Chateaubriand wrote Ren�, a fictional self-portrait in 1802 in London. In the striking picture by Catel, the shipwrecked wanderer Ren� perches on a rock beneath a Gothic castle against whose walls waves surge and crash. World-weary and melancholy, Ren� voyages in time and space just as the artist does in imagination, but finds no comfort and longs for death.