Oil on canvas, 'The Torrent', Johann Gottfried Steffan, Swiss school, 1848

Landscape painting with a turbulent mountain stream; large rocks and battered tree trunks caught along the banks; stormy sky.

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend

Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, listed in the 1868 post-mortem register of the contents of his London house (V&A R/F MA/1/T1181) in the front room as 'An Oil on canvas. The torrent. By J.G. Steffan. In frame. Signed. Swiss? Dated 1848'; bequeathed by Rev. Chauncey Hare Townshend, 1868.

Historical significance: Nicknamed by Koller the 'German Calame', alluding to the Swiss painter Alexandre Calame (1810-1864), the art of Steffan was close to Calame's style in the refined technique and choice of mountain scenes.
This painting is typical of the late Romanticism characterised by a subdued and dark palette dominated by grey and ochre hues with a focus on the sublime and overwhelming force of the natural world.
Steffan made several similar torrent scenes among which Landscape with mountain river, sold at 80th Art Auction 28 Sep. 2010, lot 133 and An Angler near a River in a mountainous landscape, dated 1851, sold at Sotheby's Amsterdam, 9 Aug. 2004, lot 1061.
This painting was probably bought by the Rev. Townshend directly from the artist and displayed in his villa in Lausanne where it completed there a large collection of 19th-century landscapes paintings.

The word Romanticism derived from the medieval term 'romance' and was first used by the German poets and critics August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel to label a wider cultural movement beginning with the late 18th and ending towards the mid 19th century. Romanticism started first in Western Europe as a literary and philosophical movement and only gradually involved the other arts, explicitly around 1800. Romantic artists were fascinated by nature they interpreted as a mirror of the mind. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious and the occult. The interest in the exotic and the non-Western, illustrated in France by such a painter as Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), as well as the medieval revival, witnessed in England by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), are perhaps the most identifiable parts of Romanticism. It is really in the Post-Napoleonic period that this movement gained ascendancy. Its greatest proponents were among others Théodore Géricault (1791-1824) and François-René de Chateaubriant (1768-1848) in France, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) in England, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) and Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) in Germany. In the visual arts, it was largely played out by 1850, but in music it persists for another generation.

Johann Gottfried Steffan (1815-1905) was born in Wädenswill near Zurich. He studied lithography at the Munich Academy from 1833 and then took up painting. He was influenced by Dutch landscape painters and the German landscape artist Carl Rottmann. He himself specialised in landscapes of lake and mountain scenes, undertaking many study visits to Bavaria and Switzerland.

This painting is a fine example of Steffan’s output of mountain landscapes. He was well known for his faithful observation of nature and his skill in depicting roaring mountain streams and waterfalls, weather-beaten trees and shimmering lakes. Such works are typical of the late Romanticism which emulated the work of Caspar David Friedrich who was an influential artistic figure in Germanic Europe.

1545-1869