Lot 2518 Dα

Michael Neher came from a long line of artists from Biberach that had produced several painters before him. His father Joseph Neher (1756-1830) was a painter himself who relocated to Munich and, according to his certificate of naturalisation, he became a citizen of that city in 1795. In the literature, Michael Neher's father is erroneously stated to be Karl Joseph Bernhard Neher the Elder (1743-1801), but the Munich citizenship document proves that his father was in fact Joseph Neher.
Michael Neher inherited his father's artistic talent and already began taking drawing lessons with Professor Mitterer in 1812. One year later he began his studies at the Academy in Munich. His tutors included the Bavarian court painter and portraitist Mathias Klotz, who was famous at the time for his theory of colours, the architectural painter Angelo I. Quaglio, and - until 1818 - Domenico Quaglio.
In 1819, Neher left Munich for Trent, where he received various important commissions, initially working as a portraitist. He travelled throughout northern Italy and then to Rome and Naples. He lived in Rome from 1823 to 1825, where he had contact to E. Fries, E. F. Oehme and A. L. Richter, as well as many other German artists from the circle of the Bavarian crown prince Ludwig. It was among them that he also had his first encounter with the Nazarene group. One great turning point in Neher's career came from his acquaintance with the painter Heinrich Maria von Hess, who had been living in Rome since 1821 and had there joined the Nazarene circle around Friedrich Overbeck and Peter von Cornelius. It was Hess who first encouraged the then 23 year old Neher to take up architectural painting and, although initially reluctant, the artist was to pursue this genre throughout his career.
Neher returned to Munich in 1825, where he founded a drawing school and took the position of conservator of the Munich Academy from 1827 to 1833.
It was during this time that he painted the present view of fishermen in an Italian town - a glittering testament to his former stay in Italy. Painted five years after his return, the work shows a group of three figures in the foreground: In the middle a man shouldering a large net and right-hand beside him a woman - presumably his wife - whilst on the left-hand side we see a second woman offering fish from a wicker basket. In the right half of the image another woman has settled down beneath the awning of her house with a spindle. The lively scene is completed by three men in the middle ground, two of whom are shown sitting on a wall and sleeping. This finely observed and minutely rendered depiction of Italian daily life is set within an idyllic landscape with a town and a river, framed on the left by ruins and a well and on the right by a large house. The viewer's gaze is led over a group of pines to a river with the shore reflected in its waters, a built up area on its opposite bank, and a mountain range in the distance.
Neher's Italian paintings are as much testimonies to everyday Italian life at the time as they are to central European art collectors' longing for Italy. They reflect in an almost idealistic way the contemporary notions of life in rural Italy as a simple but happy existence beneath the southern sun. Since in the late 1830s Neher increasingly began to turn to central European cities and Medieval architecture for his motifs, his Italian scenes appear relatively seldom on the market.
Günther Meier in Oberding has examined this work first hand and will be including it in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the works of Michael Neher. He has identified the piece with a painting that was purchased and exhibited by the Kunstverein München in 1830, the same year it was made.