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REINHART, Johann Christian - b. 1761 Hof, d. 1847 Roma - WGA

REINHART, Johann Christian

(b. 1761 Hof, d. 1847 Roma)

German painter and etcher. He was a son of Deacon Peter Johann Reinhart, who came from an old family of craftsmen, died quite early in 1764, so that Johann Christian and his brother Amandus were brought up by their mother.

Johann Christian Reinhart attended Hof’s grammar school where one of his teachers recognized the boy’s talent for drawing and encouraged him in this. Like his father, Johann Christian started to study theology because life as an artist seemed too insecure. However he turned more and more to art and started to study under Adam Friedrich Oeser, the Director of the Art Academy in Leipzig.

In 1783 he moved to Dresden to further his studies. He concentrated on landscape painting which was to form the main body of his work as an artist. In 1784 he returned to Leipzig, where he got to know Friedrich Schiller in 1785. This friendship lasted all his life. From 1786 he spent three years in Meiningen (Thuringia) at the court of Duke Georg of Meinigen, one of the centres of classicism next to Jena and Weimar.

Supported by the hereditary Prince of Coburg-Gotha, he got a grant from the Margrave of Ansbach-Bayreuth which enabled him to go to Italy. In December 1789 he reached Rome, a gathering place for artists at the time. From there, he travelled all over Italy.

In 1801 he married an Italian, Anna Caffo and together they had three children. Paintings, drawings and etchings, of which he made many prints, brought him artistic recognition and financial success. In 1839 he was appointed official court painter in Bavaria.

Landscape with Town and Bridge
Landscape with Town and Bridge by

Landscape with Town and Bridge

At the end of the eighteenth century, young landscape artists turned toward a heroic concept of the classical. This is evident in the work of the Leipzig artist Reinhart. He arrived in Rome in 1789 already fully trained in the art of landscape. For him, the most inspiring contemporary artist there was not a landscapist, but the historical artist Asmus Jacob Carstens. Under the influence of Carstens, he tried to invest classical landscape with a sense of the heroic, and to some extent he succeeded.

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The Invention of the Corinthian Capital by Callimachos
The Invention of the Corinthian Capital by Callimachos by

The Invention of the Corinthian Capital by Callimachos

Callimachos was an architect and sculptor working in the second half of the 5th century BC in the manner established by Polyclitus. Callimachos is credited with inventing the Corinthian capital, which Roman architects erected into one of the Classical orders.

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