Oil painting, 'Italian Women in a Vineyard near Rome', Julius Friedrich Antonio Schrader, German school, 1848

Two women nursing and playing with their children in a sunny landscape, on a top of a hill, with the sea in the right background.

Given by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, Bt, MP

Given by Sir Edwin Durning-Lawrence, Bt, 1901

Historical significance: This painting was probably made during Schrader's journey to Rome. It depicts women in a typical Roman costumes set in an idyllic bright landscape. This type of compositions differs from earlier works such as Woman with child on the sea coast where the inspiration appears much more indebted to the Romantic aesthetic with a particular focus on dramatic weather conditions.
Schrader was however best known for his history paintings drawing on the 15th and 16th century history and mythology and his portraits of important contemporary figures such as Friedrich II after the battle of Kolin, dated 1849, Museum der Bildenden Kunste, Leipzig, and Baron Alexander v. Humboldt, dated 1859, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The term 'Biedermeier' refers to bourgeois life and art in Germanic Europe, an extensive area embracing such cities as Copenhagen, Berlin, Vienna and Prague, from 1815 (the Congress of Vienna) to the revolutions of 1848. Biedermeier painters were ideologically opposed to academic and religious painting and favoured such subject matter as portraits, landscapes and genre scenes, with still-lifes, especially of flowers. They share a similar technique in the use of separate, clear tones and a high degree of finish, reminiscent of Neo-Classicism while they tend to convey a greater sentimentality. By the 1880s, the influence of this artistic movement was on the wane and was even used pejoratively to characterize the reactionary bourgeois elements in society, which remained quite indifferent to social problems and cultivated a sense of order and sobriety, especially in the private sphere and the domestic realm.

Julius Friedrich Antonio Schrader (1815-1900) was the son of the landscape painter Antonio Schrader. He was born in Berlin where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts and was later the pupil of Wilhelm Schadow (1788-1862) in Düsseldorf. He travelled to Holland, France and Italy in 1844 and settled in Berlin in 1847. In 1848, he became professor at the Academy and was awarded several medals among which a first-class one in 1855 (Exposition Universelle, Paris).

This painting is a fine example of the Biedermeier imagery which developed in Germany during the 19th century. It shows two Roman women with their children on top of a hill near Rome (probably the Colli Albani). The high degree of finish and clear palette is characteristic of this style along with subject matters which celebrate the intimacy of the family such as motherhood.

630-1901