Fantasy landscape

François Xavier Lampi was a painter of Italian origin born in Austria, where he also received his artistic education. He began his education with his father, the famous portraitist Jan Baptist Lampi, and continued in the atelier of Heinrich Füger and Hubert Maurer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, and most probably also in the atelier of Ignace Duvivier and Francesco Casanova. He lived mainly in Poland. In Warsaw, he managed to establish himself as a renowned portraitist. He travelled to other Polish cities to seek commissions. He also painted sentimental landscapes with staffage, often shepherd scenes against a background of mountain landscape, rock cliffs, and landscapes with ruins. One such work is a painting from the collection of the National Museum in Szczecin entitled Pejzaż fantastyczny [The Fantastic Landscape] from around 1830. The distinctive element of the representation is the silhouette of a rocky slope with a semi-circular vaulted opening at the bottom, through which water flows into a small cove at the bottom right. On the sloping ridge descending to the right, there is a man riding on a mule and a chapel (a figure with a cross), while below it, a seated figure is visible; on the right, there is a hiker with a knot on his back. There are also silhouettes of cattle (three cows, a goat facing right), and a rider on a horse in front of them. At the bottom left, the painting depicts a woman with a child on her lap, a man sitting next to her, with his back turned, and a dog. Along the left edge of the painting, there is a silhouette of a rock or a tower. Everything is depicted in dark tones using browns; the sky is shown in the colours of sunset - yellow passing into golden-orange tones. The painting follows the stylistics typical of 18th-century aesthetics. Nature is presented as majestic, and a human is only a small element of it. The landscape is painted from a distant perspective. Scenes of a fantastic nature expressed romantic longings and fascination with the fairy-tale world, and they are not attempts to represent reality.

Beata Małgorzata Wolska