Landschaft in der Nähe von Rom (Landscape near Rome), ca. 1835

Johann Jakob Frey painted this landscape on paper en plein air in the countryside near Rome. The view that he selected, flanked with groups of trees that as they diminish in size generate a sense of depth, betrays the artist’s roots in classical landscape painting. The vegetation itself, by contrast, is captured with free brushwork. Already apparent in the alternating areas of light and shade on the plain, and at its most impressive in the clouds above, is Frey’s fascination with light. The towering cumuli, brightly illuminated by the sun, billow up over the mountains, throwing the dark clouds surrounding them into relief. This beautifully finished oil study, which was probably painted in Frey’s first year in Italy, turns on what most captivated the artist about the world of nature he found there: the play of light and landscape in a constantly changing troposphere. Frey trained as an artist with his father and the painter Hieronymus Hess¹ in Basel, after which his path took him first to Paris. There he worked as a conservator and paid frequent visits to the Louvre, devoting many hours to studying seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes. Having come into contact with the paintings of Georg von Dillis and Carl Rottmann in Munich in 1834, he left for Rome the following year.² The “Eternal City” was to become his permanent home.³ Frey’s first lodgings there were on the Via di S. Isidoro, now the Via degli Artisti, one of the most coveted addresses for German-speaking artists of the day.⁴ Thus it is not surprising that painters such as Joseph Anton Koch and Johann Christian Reinhart,⁵ both of whom had a profound influence on how landscape was then viewed in Rome, also had an impact on the work of the young Swiss.⁶ Frey’s work in Rome was very successful. His studio attracted a cosmopolitan clientele that even included some crowned heads of state such as Ludwig I, King of Bavaria and the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV.⁷ Thanks to this fame, Frey was recruited as draughtsman to the 1842 Egypt expedition of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, led by Richart Lepsius,⁸ even if health reasons obliged him to return to Italy prematurely.⁹ The fact that this large-format oil study remained in the artist’s possession until the end of his days underscores how much it meant to him, both as a reference work and as a valuable memento of other paintings produced in his studio. Like countless studies by Frey – and other artists, too – it is neither dated nor signed, since it was never intended for sale. Frey’s artistic estate is unusual in that after his death, the studies that it contained remained in family hands for several generations, becoming available to the public at large only in the early 1970s or, as in the case of our work, in a publication of 2017.¹⁰