Oil painting on canvas, 'Horses and Cattle in a Storm', Hermann Baisch, German school, ca. 1870-1894

Landscape with brooding stormy skies. In the left and right foreground are two patches of vegetation. In the mid ground are a cow and two sheep making their way toward a group of cows and horses sheltering beneath a wind-swept tree. Two other trees occur to the left and right a little further into the disctance. There is a pond to the left side of the image and two buildings in the left background.

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon, 1886
Ref: Parkinson, Ronald, Catalogue of British Oil Paintings 1820-1860, (Victoria & Albert Museum, HMSO, London, 1990), p.xx.
Joshua Dixon (1811-1885), was the son of Abraham Dixon of Whitehaven and brother of George Dixon (who was head of the foreign merchants firm of Rabone Brothers in Birmingham 1883-98). Educated at Leeds Grammar School, and was deputy chairman of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway Company 1869-70. Died Winslade, near Exeter, 7 December 1885. Bequeathed all his collection of drawings, watercolours and oil paintings to the Bethnal Green Museum; they have since been transferred to the V&A. He also collected engravings, Japanese vases and panels, and bronze and marble sculpture.

Historical significance: This painting is characteristic of the 19th-century German art which was strongly influenced by the 17th-century Dutch imagery. The dramatic effect of light and difficult weather conditions is on the other hand reminiscent of the post-Romantic output.
Baisch worked for some time in Paris under Rousseau and seemed to have found his inspiration in the land by the North sea and in the wide plains bordering the Dutch coast. Such pictures dramatised by the effect of the storm on the natural elements attracted patrons and collectors of the 19th century although this movement waned under the development of Impressionism.
Comparable works include Highway in Rainy Weather, Holland and Dutch Pasturage, Morning in the National Gallery of Victoria as well as a painting dated 1882-84, presented at Sotheby's London, 23 Nov. 2000, lot. 16. Compare with these compositions, the V&A painting is particularly remarkable for the rendering of the wind effect in the foliage.

Hermann Baisch (1846-1894) was born in Dresden and studied at the School of Art in Stuttgart. His father was a lithographer. He went to Paris in 1868, where he was greatly influenced by 17th century Dutch paintings and by the Barbizon School. Baisch moved to Munich and became a professor at the Carlsruhe Academy in 1881. He received many awards at the end of his life and became a member of the Munich and the Berlin Academies.

This painting is a good example of the naturalistic landscapes Baisch started to paint in the 1870s when he came back from France. This work, which depicts horses, cattle and sheep sheltering under trees from a storm, shows dramatic rendering of light and difficult weather conditions characteristic of the French Naturalist painters and the Dutch imagery from the 17th century.

1081-1886