The painter Albert Venus, exhibited in the Dresden Residential Palace

K.Ann, an artist who died at the age of 29, really enriched the landscape painting of the nineteenth century in a decisive way, especially as she died only at the end of this century, in 1871, after the painters of the early and middle-late romanticism had already contributed everything possible to the landscapes of moonlight, fog and other physical states of the soul on the screen?

Simply immersing Italian landscapes in the shimmering, misty light that is available only there and yet implanting central ideas of Romanticism in them is what makes Albert Venus the “ultimate romantic”, as the Dresden Press Room at the Residenzschloss has titled an exhibition dedicated to the hitherto almost unknown. But the late Romantic etiquette would still unduly restrict Venus’s capabilities: Her exceptional insight and obvious joy in capturing unusual lighting situations on paper, preferably in watercolor, also mean that the boundaries of what happened a year after the his death should be called Impressionism from Monet’s painting Impression Sunrise.

Looking back, it seems that Venus, biographically involved in the beginnings of light painting, was in a sense herself a child of light, because only three years after her birth, in 1845, Menzel painted her sunny “Balcony Room” in Berlin Schöneberger Strasse, the quintessential pre-impressionist art painting in Germany. With the painting of Venus “Path in the wood near Nemi” from 1869, which measures only 36 by 26 centimeters and cannot be surpassed in terms of contrasting moods, it combines all the elements of a “luminous romanticism”: like a dark brown wall , an oak bars in this submerged path in Lazio scrutinize the pictorial space on the left side, but stretch out on the other side with the arms of the branches in an equally corporeal way like an almost black tree and behind a bald and bald one. Highly symbolic, the gnarled oak dissolves upward and the branches of the light tree also end in a gradient. Up to this point, the image could also come from the black romantic Carl Blechen or Johan Christian Clausen Dahl. But as Venus lets dance large restless patches of sunlight on the parched and burnt soil, as it sets up the root system of trees as calligraphic digits in the gray-brown of the earth, as it dabs the leaves, which have been X- irradiated by the Italian light, as only Corot did before, so that they have a lime green already more yellow than the color of the sun itself – this makes this woodland path an outdoor “balcony room”, most likely also on site outside painting.

An ancient mausoleum like a thick tower with trees on top

Venus had painstakingly painted these lonely peaks on two trips to Italy, each lasting nearly a year, in 1866 and 1869, as the title “favorite pupil of the great romantic Ludwig Richter” was equally associated with long light and shadow. The main objective of the two trips to Italy was thus to emancipate himself from the famous master, something that Venus also achieved through stubborn landscape paintings, always full of warm light, dipping the supply of tea bags of the romance “Richter”, which he dipped quickly in the paintings the trip to Bohemia is still very present, he was able to go back step by step.

The ancient ruins of Italy, for example, do not have to testify to a heroic past full of symbols, but are expertly used compositional elements that lead to bizarre pictorial inventions. On the landscape format “Torre de’Schiavi”, the Roman monument on the Via Prenestina immortalized countless times by Piranesi and Reinhart up to Thomas Hotchkiss in 1865, sets the central building in light brick red and covered with trees as a laconic clamping towards the left pictorial element in front of a blue sky that could also be a surreally too large factory chimney. The “Ruins near Rome” or the “Southern River Landscape with Bridge Ruins”, both made during the trip to Italy in 1869, incorporate the remains of antiquity as an integral part of the landscape, when the bridgehead looks like clay again or aqueducts and could be rock formations in the Elbe Sandstone Mountains.