Detail of a Heroic Landscape with a Rainbow by Koch in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, August 2010

Heroic Landscape with Rainbow

Joseph Anton Koch (German, Obergibeln bei Elbigenalp 1768–1839 Rome)

Date: 1824

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 42 3/4 x 37 3/4 in. (108.6 x 95.9 cm)

Classification: Paintings

Credit Line: Purchase, Anne Cox Chambers Gift, Gift of Alfred and Katrin Romney, by exchange, and Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art Funds, 2008

Accession Number: 2008.420

Gallery Label:

The classically-trained painter Joseph Anton Koch was a father-figure to many of the younger German artists who visited Rome in the early nineteenth century. He renewed the genre of the heroic landscape, which had been established by the seventeenth-century French masters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. Koch’s fame rests on this iconic image, which he referred to as a “Greek landscape.” It is the fourth and final version of a composition he first painted in 1805 (Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe).


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