Carl Georg Adolph Hasenpflug

Carl Georg Adolph Hasenpflug Castle ruins in winter seen from a Gothic arch Oil on canvas. 38 x 42.4 cm. Signed and dated lower left: C. Hasenpflug 1850. Provenance Sotheby's, Munich, 3.12.1996, lot 25 - German private collection. At the age of 18, Carl Hasenpflug began an apprenticeship as a decorative painter in the workshop of Carl Wilhelm Gropius. However, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, for whom Gropius created theater decorations at the time, played a decisive role in his further development. Schinkel's famous painting "Gothic Cathedral in Winter" from 1813/14 is likely to have left a lasting impression on the young painter. After early city views, Hasenpflug soon specialized in the depiction of medieval buildings, especially after he moved to Halberstadt in 1830. Here he painted his wintry, mostly snow-covered churches or ruins - Magdeburg Cathedral, Heisterbach Abbey, Walkenried Monastery, for example - but above all many other, non-localizable architectural motifs that are unmistakably part of his repertoire. It is probably not the buildings themselves that primarily interest the painter, but the romantically transfigured mood they create in the viewer. Thus his gaze - as in this painting from 1844 - wanders from an abandoned medieval building with stones lying around out into the cold, deserted winter landscape.