Heroic Landscape with Rainbow

1824 · Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

landscape

This signed and dated painting is the fourth and final version of a composition he first painted in 1805. Koch renewed the genre of the heroic landscape, which had been established by the seventeenth-century French masters Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin.

Loading map…

About the Artist

Joseph Anton Koch

1768 – 1839

Austrian painter, active mainly in Rome, where he settled in 1795. He was influenced by Carstens and worked with the Nazarenes on the decorations of the Casino Massimo (1825-29) in Rome, choosing Dante's Inferno for his subject, but is now best known for his landscapes. They were directly descended from the heroic and ideal landscape of Poussin, but have a distinctive Romantic flavour, particularly in his paintings of mountains.

View all works →