Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (Biberach an der Riss, 23 March 1609 – Augsburg, 1684) (attr.), Lady on Horseback at an Inn and Dice Players

Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (Biberach an der Riß, 23 March 1609 – Augsburg, 1684) (attr.)

Lady on Horseback at an Inn and Dice Players

(2) Oil on canvas, 98 x 74,5 cm

Johann Heinrich Schönfeld (Biberach an der Riss, 23 March 1609 – Augsburg, 1684) was a German painter and engraver, also very active in Italy. He was the eldest son of Johann Baptist Schönfeld and Susanna Schumacher. His father, a successful goldsmith, was mayor of Biberach an der Riss and his family once belonged to the nobility.

The artist trained in his homeland with the painter Johann Sichelbein of Memmingen: from this very early segment of the artist's activity, only the charcoal sketch on paper for a Diana signed and dated 1626 remains. Towards the end of the 20s, the then young painter was in Stuttgart, at the ducal court, as was Johann Wilhelm Baur, an engraver and miniaturist, whom he would later meet again in Rome. From 1633 onwards, he stayed in Italy for a long time, not only because of the Thirty Years' War, which in those years was bloodying Central Europe and significantly hindering the art market in the Germanic countries, but also because of the fascination exerted by the peninsula, perceived in German soil as a destination for intellectual pilgrimages. He was first in Rome, where he was influenced by the classicist tendencies of Nicolas Poussin and the baroque decorativism of Pietro da Cortona, then, starting in 1638, in Naples, where he made his own, reinterpreting it, the Caravaggesque luminism of Bernardo Cavallino. During his Roman period, he frequented other German artists, including certainly Joachim von Sandrart and Johann Wilhelm Baur. He painted a Visitation (around 1647), now lost, for the Church of Sant'Elisabetta de' Fornari, property of the German bakers in Rome. He was also under the protection of Paolo Giordano II Orsini. Returning to Swabia in 1652 (after the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 the art market had regained strength), he settled in Augsburg, where he achieved considerable success both with private collectors and with ecclesiastical patrons: his is the altarpiece of the Assumption in the city cathedral. His paintings on historical and mythological subjects are also numerous (today preserved mainly in Dresden, Vienna and St. Petersburg). The artist from Biberach an der Riss is considered by today's critics to be one of the most eminent German painters of the Baroque era, who, with the luminosity of his touch and the delicacy of his colour, anticipated some aspects of Rococo art in Germany.

The two beautiful canvases in question could constitute the second version of two paintings that are particularly well-known in the German artist's pictorial corpus: the Lady on Horseback at an Inn in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (inv. Gemäldegalerie, 6301), which became part of the collections of the prestigious Viennese institution in 1915, and Soldiers Playing Dice from the collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein, acquired by the royals of the small Central European state as early as 1697, a few years after the artist's death, testifying to the great critical success of the German painter starting from the second half of the XNUMXth century.

The object is in good condition