Landschaft mit Wasserfall

Feuerbach's 1865 'Landschaft mit Wasserfall' (Landscape with Waterfall), held in the Bavarian State Painting Collections, belongs to the same moment of his career as his Laura, Iphigenie, and Ariosto subjects, painted during his productive Roman years. That two of the four waterfall landscapes in this batch — Stuck's 1896 version and this 1865 work — share the same title is coincidental but instructive: the waterfall landscape was a standard subject across German painting from the Romantic period through the late nineteenth century. Feuerbach's version would carry different emotional weight from Stuck's: where Stuck might bring Symbolist darkness to natural scenery, Feuerbach's landscape sensibility was formed by Italian nature — the warm, amber-lit countryside of Lazio and Campagna — and by the classical landscape tradition of Claude Lorrain, whose Arcadian views organized the European experience of Italian scenery for centuries.

Italian landscape in the Claude Lorrain tradition employs a tripartite tonal structure: dark foreground framing elements (typically trees or rocks), a middle distance of warm light, and a pale aerial perspective in the distance.