Lot 1495 Dα

The present large-format painting, virtuously composed and executed, demonstrates Andreas Achenbach's predilection for presenting dynamic sequences of movement in nature. This is seen in the unrestrained water bursting its banks as well as the animated sky, where mighty cloud formations pile up, allowing only isolated glimpses of the blue horizon.
The viewer's attention is captured above all by the waterfall-like storming torrent, whose white spray, set against the subtle brown and green tones of the river banks, is the bright middlepoint of the composition (see detail on the cover). As a dominating pictorial element, waterfalls appear in Dutch painting already in the first half of the 17th century. Ca. 1640 the “Dutch Italians,” such as Hermann van Swanevelt, Jan Both and Jan Asselijn, were the first to take up roughly moving water as a predominate theme in their paintings. After a journey to Scandinavia, Allaert van Everdingen made the waterfall the central subject of his work, in the work of Jacob van Ruisdael the theme achieves its best-known formulations.
In his “Landscape with Torrent” Andres Achenbach takes up this tradition of 17th Dutch painting. He became acquainted with Scandinavian landscapes during a number of journeys. In 1835 he visited Denmark and Sweden for the first time, where among his excursions was one to the waterfalls at Trollhättan; later journeys were to made to Norway and also the Netherlands, to France and England and a numbers of times to Italy, which Oswald Achenbach also frequently visited.
Andreas was not only the older but, during their lifetimes, by far the more admired of the Achenbach brothers. He received numerous international awards, such as from Belgium, Russia, France and Norway, whereby his hometown Düsseldorf (although not born there, it was the place where he spent the greater part of his life) did not want to stand behind and in 1895 made him an honorary citizen.
The Achenbach brothers divided, as it were, the genre landscape painting. While Oswald primarily painted south Italian landscapes and scenes of the local life there, with a particular accent on virtuoso lighting effects (see lot 1507), Andreas emphasized dynamic, dramatic moments, above all in landscapes of north and middle Europe, as well as storm whipped marines (see lots 1503-1506). Accordingly, they equally were leaders of the Dusseldorf school of painting - “the A and O of landscape,” as Julius Hübner called them.