This beautiful late-19th-century oil painting by German artist Heinrich Hiller (1846-1912) depicts a view with a shepherd, sheep, wayside shrine and distant buildings. Hiller was an accomplished painter of landscapes and maritime subjects.
Wrapped in a golden glow, he drives his flock along a well-traversed rural track. The sky beyond shifting through bewitching gradients. A wayside shrine stands poignantly alongside - the grandeur of the natural world at its most evocative hour. In the distance, several cliff-top buildings, and beyond them, a river.
Hiller was a romantic, captivated by the irrepressible effects of nature. He travelled extensively in search of the sublime, often working in the Alpine region of Tyrol, Rhineland, Switzerland, Bavaria and Italy. His compositions celebrate the scenery he encountered at a time of ever-increasing industrialisation. Rather than embrace modernity, he found joy in the slower pace of rural life and the permanency of God’s enduring creation.
He exhibited for almost 20 years at the Berlin Academy, also at Dresden, Hanover and Lübeck.
Signed in the lower left, inscribed ‘Dusseldorf’ and held within a later frame.
Learn more about Heinrich Hiller in our directory.
Medium: Oil on canvas
Overall size: 40” x 29½” / 102cm x 75cm
Year of creation: c. 1870
Provenance: Private collection, Germany.
Condition: Cleaned. Faint stretcher imprint. Craquelure throughout. The paint layer is stable. Frame in good condition with minor age-related wear.
Artist’s auction maximum: £25,212 for ‘Rom. Wäscherinnen am Tiberufer unterhalb der Engelsburg’, Oil on canvas, Cologne, Germany, 2008.
Our reference: BRV1920
